Mass Detainment of Illegal Immigrants in Russia Underway
'If you want to stay, you need to go to Ukraine for a year'
Putin’s «Year of the Family» continued on January 1st as thousands of migrant workers from the former Southern republics strolled down St. Petersburg’s main boulevard, Nevsky Prospekt, and were funneled into an area surrounded by Putin’s “men in black.”
Once inside the fenced-off area, “documents” (passport, immigration status, travel visa, military readiness status) were checked, and those holidaymakers whose documents raised questions were herded into waiting buses. A local news agency in St. Petersburg, Fontanka.ru, reported that those with “document issues” were offered two options: To be sent back to their home countries or fight in Ukraine.
And so the new year begins with another hidden mobilization. Such raids on immigrants in Russia could easily supply the Russian army with 100,000 fresh bodies whose legal status and rights as humans would be roughly on the same level as the convicts the country has excitedly fed into the war hopper. At this stage in the war with Ukraine, a move such as throwing living, breathing bodies at the front is probably a more strategically valuable one than attacking with hypersonic missiles.
Russia, like the United States, needs immigrant workers because, as in the United States, regular Russian citizens refuse to do the backbreaking “dirty” work now done, usually by illegal aliens or recent legal arrivals and traditionally in Russia, the period from January 1st to the 10th had been a quiet time when anyone with document problems could enjoy life free from the worry of being harassed by the Russian government’s agents. Most officials are usually hungover and enjoying the New Year’s break, and they don’t want to be bothered with the calls from anxious underlings. It was also a period when the police cleaned house collecting bribes because they, too, would “look the other way” for a fee.
There is no reason to doubt that Russia is detaining these desperate people from the South. They are everywhere in Russia and perform a necessary function in the local economies of most cities. Snow removal from the rooftops and the clearing of ice from the sidewalks is predominantly done by them. This kind of work may seem unimportant to people who have yet to experience wintry conditions, but I can tell you that unremoved ice and snow for months can sometimes seem apocalyptic. The muscles in both of my shoulders were torn because of hard falls on the city’s streets making certain movements still painful many years later.
It is remarkable the way Putin has so diabolically determined that the waning support for his war of genocide must now be rebranded for 2024. By declaring 2024 the “Year of the Family,” Putin is, in ways that only Russians can understand and with the faux sincerity that only a former KGB agent could muster, telling everyone that the new front is the Russian family. He will now discretely manipulate love for family and offer his minions a choice: You can align yourselves with the West and be anti-war, or you can watch as your family members go off to feed war’s unquenchable thirst and
hunger.
Fearful for their own family members who haven’t yet been pulled into the war’s belly, the detainment of immigrants to be sent off to fight and die for Russia is made a non-issue — “Better them than us, right?”
The Year of the Family, folks. Not even Orwell was so prolific.