A Russian defense official has requested that Yakutia, a region with a non-ethnic Russian majority in northeastern Siberia, send 500 men to the Ukrainian front on a weekly basis to improve its ranking.
Aleksandr Avdonin, the military commissar of Yakutia, told a closed-door meeting with local officials in September that the region was at the bottom of the pack in terms of troop recruitment.
Yakutia had filled its recruitment plan by only one-third, Avdonin told them, according to rights group Free Yakutia Foundation, which acquired an audio recording of the meeting. That was the lowest among regions in Russia's Far East, he said.
He urged officials to send 15 residents from each district on a weekly basis until the end of the year. Yakutia, one of the poorest regions in Russia, has 36 districts, which would imply sending 540 men a week to Ukraine.
Yakuts, a Turkic-speaking people, are the largest ethnic group in Yakutia, followed by Russians. The Kremlin has tried to justify its aggression against Ukraine on various spurious grounds, including the need to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Rights groups have said that some ethnic minorities in Russia have shared a greater burden of the war effort than their percentage of the Russian population would imply. Ethnic regions of Russia are among the poorest and men may be attracted by the high salaries offered to fight in Ukraine.
Avdonin did not hide the fact that Russians are dying in large numbers in eastern Ukraine but said that he and local officials could face consequences if they did not increase recruitment, noting that the Defense Ministry and Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and current deputy chairman of the Security Council, are monitoring regional recruitment.
"We will work, we will work hard, we will send people. Because nothing has ended. It seems some people are saying that the [Ukrainian] counteroffensives have been stopped, that it seemingly has become easier at the front, but not a damn thing is easier. The guys in the trenches are dying every day," the Free Yakutia Foundation quoted Avdonin as saying.
Yakutia is located about 5,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian front, or more than twice as far as the United Kingdom and the Ukrainian front.