The Duma mobilizes to defend the mobilization – Newspaper Kommersant No. 180 (7381) of 09/29/2022

The meeting of the State Duma on Wednesday was held in an almost festive atmosphere: the deputies congratulated each other on the historic event when “Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson region are returning home.” For the sake of adopting the legislative decisions necessary for this, the Duma will hold additional meetings early next week. In addition, the deputies discussed and condemned the actions of those who “flee the country” and the mistakes of those who “shadow the mobilization”.

State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin began the meeting on September 28 by congratulating “our brothers – everyone who took part in the vote for reunification with Russia.” He then announced that the Duma would change its schedule and postpone the “regional week” (the period when deputies leave to work with voters) so that plenary sessions would be held on October 3 and 4 to make “necessary decisions.” “What caused this, you yourself understand,” he added pointedly.

Separately, Mr. Volodin decided to comment on the situation with those “who today have chickened out and stand in queues many kilometers long in order to leave for Georgia, Kazakhstan, and other republics,” devoting a long speech to them. First, the speaker said that these people “sang of the West and those countries that have now abandoned them, they are despised.” Then he read out “a document that is required for signing from those who cross the Russian-Georgian border”, where, in particular, “the signatory admits that his country is an aggressor” – such, according to Mr. Volodin, will be punished in Russia. Then, commenting on the proposal of the communist Nikolai Kharitonov to block the exit of these citizens from the country, the Chairman of the Duma asked himself “why are they here” – “consumers, traitors”, “healthy, young, not very young, as a rule, wealthy”, who flee and “ leave their parents, grandparents.” The speaker also said that in Russia they are compiling lists of those who “are now standing on the road”, and suggested that the cars abandoned by them be given to “the families of the guys who went to fight.”

The faction leaders who spoke after that focused on the two main topics of the last days: referendums and mobilization.

Yes, leader CPRF Gennady Zyuganov congratulated his colleagues on the historic event: “In the year of the centenary of the formation of the USSR, we arrived.” He also stated that the governors should take control of the “mobilization operation”. The head of the Communists himself has already “instructed” the governor of the Oryol region from the Communist Party Andrei Klychkov. As a result, according to Mr. Zyuganov, in the region “the first set passed in three sieves, no one was offended, no one was humiliated, mostly volunteers.”

Chairman LDPR Leonid Slutsky spoke about “unreasonable actions in recent days, as a result of which there were attempts to mobilize pensioners, students, and the disabled.” “We must not pour water on the mill of our enemies with our excessive actions,” the deputy declared and promised to keep the questions of partial mobilization under hourly control.

Party leader “Fair Russia – For the Truth” Sergei Mironov argued in absentia with German Foreign Minister Annalena Berbock, who said that people were forced to vote at gunpoint in past referendums. “No, Frau Minister, it was your grandfathers and fathers who came here, to our land, and here they destroyed people, burned and raped … We have to finish destroying fascism in the center of Europe, our soldiers,” he said.

According to the head of the party “New people” Aleksey Nechaev, the task of “Ukrainian propagandists and their Western teachers is to try to disrupt or at least overshadow the mobilization,” but its course really raises many questions. “The mobilization is announced as partial, but it is carried out in such a way that there is a feeling that it is, so to speak, almost a large-scale mobilization for war. For some reason, the military commissars send not 300 thousand summonses, but much more: three, in some regions five or six times more … They scared people out of the blue, ”Mr. Nechaev lamented.

Faction leader “United Russia” Vladimir Vasilyev agreed that it is necessary to protect all those who are called by mistake. In addition, he turned to colleagues who expressed a desire to participate in the special operation: “Do not ask to go to the front, here it is – your front, we can do more here.” “We will have to tighten up both the responsibility of officials and all sorts of people who like to get profit illegally,” the head of the United Russia Duma noted, promising to prevent “corruption in conscription issues.”

Maria Makutina, Ksenia Veretennikova