Poor, rural Russian region hit hard by partial military mobilisation

A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilisation to boost the armies fighting in Ukraine, officials arrived at Mr Alexander Bezdorozhny’s house with draft papers ordering him to present himself for service.

LONDON – But they were calling on a dead man. Mr Bezdorozhny, who suffered from chronic inflammation of the lungs, died at the age of 40 in December 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, while on a ventilator at a hospital in his Siberian hometown of Ulan-Ude, just north of Mongolia, his sister Natalia Semyonova told Reuters.

“It hurts me that the state only remembered him after he was dead,” Ms Semyonova, a professional musician and activist in Ulan-Ude, told Reuters, recounting the call-up for her brother. “He was an invalid, and had never served in the army.”