The governors moved to the front line – Newspaper Kommersant No. 225 (7426) dated 05.12.

Last Friday, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin visited the “defense line” in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), where he talked with mobilized residents of the capital. Mr. Sobyanin had previously visited “sponsored” Lugansk, but had not examined the trenches before. On Sunday, Kursk governor Roman Starovoit visited those mobilized in the Kupyansk sector. For a month now, President Vladimir Putin has been personally asking the heads of regions to pay attention to the mobilized and their families, and it seems that this task is becoming a priority for them.

In the month that has passed since the end of partial mobilization (Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported on it on October 28), Vladimir Putin met with five governors. Each time, the president focused on supporting the soldiers and their relatives. “Be sure to continue to provide support, do not forget about the families of our citizens – military personnel who are doing their military duty, defending the Fatherland. Please”,- asked he November 1 Governor of the Krasnodar Territory Veniamin Kondratiev. And already on November 2, in a conversation with the Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhaev addedthat “it is necessary to think about each of them, provide direct targeted support to themselves, and their loved ones, their families.” At a meeting with Governor of the Tver Region Igor Rudenya, who passed On November 7, Vladimir Putin asked to “summarize the array of material and issues” on payments to the mobilized and provide “proposals for their solution.” Head of the Altai Territory Viktor Tomenko President November 14 urged pay “special attention” to support: it “should be paramount.” Finally, on November 25, the head of state Meets with the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, but the Kremlin did not provide details of their conversation.

The heads of the constituent entities have previously dealt with the problems of fellow countrymen who ended up at the front, but Vladimir Putin’s request has clearly taken this process to a qualitatively new level.

For example, Viktor Tomenko began to reproduce the president’s words almost verbatim at his own meetings with the heads of districts. It got to the point that the regional ministry of social protection decided to publish reports on the exact number of mobilized families that were visited by “teams of specialists” in each particular municipality. According to the agency, by the end of November, 1,700 complaints had been received from relatives of soldiers on domestic issues, from establishing paternity to repairing the roof.

Rolled up his sleeves and Veniamin Kondratiev. Two days after the audience, he reported on the free New Year gifts that the children of mobilized Krasnodar residents would receive, as well as on the payment of 20 thousand rubles from the regional budget. for each child – also for the holiday. At the end of November, Mr. Kondratyev held a personal reception for the wives and mothers of the fighters and promised to solve their everyday problems, in some cases going to significant investments. So, after a resident of the village of Severskaya complained that she lives in a new microdistrict without a kindergarten, Mr. Kondratiev instructed his subordinates to “select a land plot and start building it as early as 2023.”

Personal meetings of governors with family members of the mobilized have become, perhaps, the most common practice of public display of care. Recall, Vladimir Putin himself met with the mothers of the fighters on November 25. Dmitry Makhonin (Perm Territory), Roman Starovoit (Kursk Region), Alexander Brechalov (Udmurtia), Sergey Melikov (Dagestan), Vasily Golubev (Rostov Region), Kazbek Kokov (Kabardino-Balkaria), Roman Busargin (Saratov Region) have already reported on similar events. region) and many other regional leaders.

The head of Khakassia, Valentin Konovalov, went further than his colleagues, declaring Monday “a single day for receiving family members of mobilized citizens.” And the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, at a meeting with the families of the fighters, supported the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bcreating a “city public council to address issues of supporting the mobilized and their families.” In addition, Mr. Beglov promised introduce the position of an adviser who will oversee these issues.

Another common practice is the creation of a “social passport” for the family of a mobilized person, which contains information about all relatives and their problems.

Such “passports” have already been introduced in Chukotka, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug and the Voronezh Region, and are being developed in the Leningrad Region. In Buryatia, they thought about the socialization of returned fighters: for them, the rates of teachers in schools and instructors in military registration and enlistment offices are being prepared. And in the Nizhny Novgorod region, “health trains” were organized, which went to all collection points where mobilized residents of the region are being trained in order to double-check their condition and, if necessary, help to commission.

Finally, the most proven way to show the governor’s care is to go to the mobilized “to the front.”

In addition to Sergei Sobyanin, who went to the LPR last week, Stavropol Governor Vladimir Vladimirov went there at the end of November, visiting the front line in the Kherson region. The head of Kamchatka, Vladimir Solodov, also visited Svetlodarsk and Mironovskoye (Donetsk People’s Republic) not far from the contact line. On Sunday, Kursk Governor Roman Starovoit announced a visit to the mobilized in the combat zone.

Concern for the mobilized and their families has become not just a key KPI for the heads of regions – it creates new risks for them, political scientist Konstantin Kalachev believes: “The federal center, of course, monitors the situation, which elite opponents can use: inflate some kind of story, drag in the head into a scandal, give reason to doubt his effectiveness or patriotism. Insufficiency of efforts or scandalous cases can become a reason for personnel withdrawal. Especially if there were already reasons for this and only a reason was missing.

Andrey Prakh, corset “Kommersant”