Discontent over the draft has extended beyond Chechnya.
While many protests have taken place in the northern Caucasus, there have also been demonstrations in the Siberian city ofFury at the mobilization has been especially pronounced in Dagestan, which neighbors Chechnya and shares many of its cultural attributes. “I think Dagestan is going to become a hot spot for anti-mobilization protests going forward,” Russia expert Samuel Ramani told Yahoo News. “Unrest, sometimes, in one autonomous region can extend to others.
Despite the Kremlin’s Slavocentric emphasis, Russia is a multinational state; though it is dominated by population centers in the country’s west, the 5,600 miles from its European holdings to its Pacific coast contain a rich panoply of ethnicities, religions and cultures. Goble describes the Kremlin’s approach to the mobilization as having been conducted by Russian President Vladimir Putin under a cynical premise: “How do I carry this out so that few people in Moscow and St. Petersburg get rounded up?”