Thousands of people continue to take to the streets across Russia to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forced conscription of able-bodied men under the age of 18 to 27 into military service to become fodder in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, USA Today reports.
In the video above, hundreds of women in the Eastern Siberian town of Yakutsk, population 280,000, protest the order that would send their sons and husbands to Ukraine to bolster the military at the front as Russian troops continue to take significant losses. Protests erupted in Moscow, the capital, and Yekaterinburg, a regional capital with more than 1.2 million people.
Russians are openly defying Putin’s mandate to suppress opposition to the war, with police instructed to detain anyone who expresses any doubt about the legitimacy of the war under the guise of stopping the disparagement of the military.