Military enlistment centers across Russia have become the target of renewed attacks, according to Ukrainian and Russian media reports. Those arrested by Russian authorities in connection with the attacks have blamed “scammers.”
At least 20 military enlistment offices in Russia were attacked on Tuesday, Mash, a Russian outlet linked to Moscow’s security forces, reported on Wednesday. The previous day, nine facilities were targeted with fire attacks, Ukrainian outlet Strana said on Wednesday.
Russian media reported at least 17 cases of arson since Saturday at registration and enlistment offices across Russia, the BBC’s Russian-language service said on Tuesday. “The attacks are apparently carried out not by opponents of the war, but by the victims of telephone scammers,” with those accused of setting the fires often described as elderly or vulnerable, the BBC said.
In one of the reported cases, Vladimir Vladimirov, the governor of Russia’s southwestern Stavropol region, said on Tuesday that a woman had attempted to launch a Molotov cocktail, an improvised flammable explosive device, at an enlistment center after becoming “a victim of scammers.”
One Telegram channel aggregating local news from the Russian region of Chita reported on Tuesday that a teenager had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a local enlistment center “believing that she was helping the [Russian] special services.”
This type of attack on military recruitment centers has been reported across the country by Russian media, although state-linked and independent Russian sources paint a complicated picture of the reasons behind the attacks.
Russian media reports have identified two sets of “scams:” one through monetary extortion or blackmail and the other involving people posing as Russian security service operatives.
“Phone scammers are now not just trying to steal money, but, posing as security officials, offer to set fire to the commissariats to allegedly solve problems,” reported Mash, a channel that often posts content and data reportedly sourced from Russia’s security apparatus.
“Almost all the detainees became victims of telephone scammers,” according to the Russian outlet Baza. “They were convinced that their actions help to catch criminals,” Baza wrote on Telegram.
The independent Russian outlet Mediazona reported on Tuesday that since the start of the all-out war in Ukraine in February 2022, around 113 military registration and enlistment offices had been targeted across Russia. In 21 of these cases, those responsible for attempting to set fire to the facilities “were persuaded to do so by scammers who convinced the Russians that they were participating in some kind of special operation,” the outlet said.
A regional office of Russia’s security service, the FSB, told state-backed news agency Tass on Wednesday that “fraudsters” had forced those setting fire to military offices “to make financial transactions” before “manipulating” them into the attacks in exchange for the return of their money.
This is not the first spate of attacks targeting Russian military enlistment centers and registration offices since the start of the war in Ukraine.
In September 2022, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” for Moscow’s war effort, military enlistment centers, including in Russia’s second-largest city, St Petersburg, were set alight, with several more fires reported by media in the following days.
The Kremlin has resisted another large wave of forced mobilization, but would struggle to source enough new troops “to resource even one new army” without it, the British Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.
Source : Newsweek
