A top Vladimir Putin propagandist has demanded executions by firing squad of Russian army enlistment officers over the chaos of mobilisation.
The president’s leading cheerleaders are outraged over officers’ poor decisions to send students, alcoholics, the sick and elderly to the front.
Plans to recruit at least 300,000 reservists is such a shambles that there’s even speculation of a deliberate attempt by the enemy within to “sabotage” Putin’s control of Russia and his war with Ukraine.
Vladimir Solovyov, Putin’s favourite TV propagandist, had originally led calls for mobilisation, but in a new and vicious blame game, he is targeting bungling enlistment officials for discrediting the call-up.
He and head of the RT propaganda media network, Margarita Simonyan, admit they’ve been personally inundated with a flood of complaints by friends, workmates and acquaintances over the conscription drive.
Solovyov told viewers that incompetent recruitment officials should themselves be ordered to the front, or even face execution.
They deserved “to be punished in the cruellest way”, he said.
“A number of enlistment officers apparently decided that the simplest thing to do is to come to major organisations, because everything is well organised there, and plainly drag out one third of the staff,” he said.
“Every idiot at the local level [who] decided that they can draft a musician or a person with a million diseases, or approach a student [to be mobilised], should be not just punished, but put into the fighting troops and sent first to the front.”
Ex-Ukrainian MP Ihor Markov, a Moscow loyalist, criticised the decision for students to be mobilised - contrary to top-level orders - and rusty rifles being issued to called up reservists.
He saw this as a deliberate attempt by the enemy within to undermine Putin and his unpopular war.
He stormed: “Do you think this is a coincidence? I think not, I think this is deliberate sabotage.”
Solovyov demanded: “I would propose to take them all out and shoot them by firing squad immediately and publicly.”
He also accused the officials of sabotage to thwart Putin and the war.
“If someone is trying to discredit the supreme commander in chief [Putin] I actively advise against doing that,” he told viewers.
“The president of the country, the supreme commander in chief, had very precisely formulated the criteria [for calling people up], and if it turns out that someone locally prefers not to see that, he has to be punished in the cruellest way.”
Solovyov claimed the defence ministry was seeking to rectify the mess.
But Markov warned that “the biggest secret subversive groups are located in the various cabinets of power”, repeating his assertion that officials on the inside are deliberately seeking to cripple the Putin regime.
Simonyan complained on TV that little had changed since the nineteenth century Crimean War in the enlistment of Russian troops.
She demanded that Putin's government must “stop the chaos”.
Later she raged on social media: “All these days we are sorting out mishaps of mobilisation.
“We’ve got entire departments - myself included - dropping everything, postponing our regular work - we're trying to get justice for everyone who's been wrongfully mobilised.
“Among these people are hundreds of people we don’t know, dozens of people we know, some of our staff. We treat everyone equally.
“Our efforts came down to one thing: no-one, not a single lawyer, official or a military commissar - really knows what 'illegally mobilised’ actually means.
“Some believe it means they can grab everyone except jail inmates, others think it means only men under 35 years old, with previous army experience.
“We are calling and raising alarms among anyone we can reach to stop the chaos.
“We very. Very. VERY much anticipate the victory of common sense, and that the partial mobilisation became transparent, legal and orderly in the shortest possible terms.”
Many believe that Putin propagandists are facing the ugly consequences of the mobilisation drive they advocated — as hundreds of thousands of men seek to flee the country to avoid the call-up.
Simonyan claimed that mobilisation - which she has strongly advocated for weeks - was not the ideal, but is now needed as Russia faces threats from not just Ukraine, but the massed ranks of NATO.
This reflects a twisting propaganda storyline from the aim of subjugating Ukraine to fighting a patriotic ‘people’s war’ against the West through NATO due to massive arms supplies to Kyiv.
They also turned their fire on those seeking to escape.
"Good riddance,” said Simonyan.
Solovyov said: “One side went, seen off like real heroes to the people's war, and the others are sneakily finding out where and how to buy tickets.
“I do not condemn anyone, I don't even want to talk about this.
“We ourselves raised people like this for 30 years.”
