Penza Blogger Creates a Chat to Protect Residents form Officials Seeking to Force Them to Sign Military Contracts and Fight in Ukraine – and People in Other Regions are Relying On it Too

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 12 – Stanislav Morozov has just created a chat on line that shows what officials are doing to hunt down and force men there to sign military contracts and go to fight in Ukraine and helping Russians there and elsewhere resist such actions by highlighting this abuse of power, according to the Horizontal Russia portal.

            In the first ten days, more than 1200 people signed up to his chat. Most were from the Penza Region, but Morozov says that Russians in other regions have asked that they not be dropped because they fear officials may use similar tactics on them in the future and want to resist as well (semnasem.org/articles/2026/08/12/idet-ohota).

            What the right-wing blogger is doing, the portal continues, is demonstrating to the Kremlin that it will not be able to “drive people to the war by force” and that if the Kremlin wants to continue the war, it must come up with a kind of agenda that the Russian people can and will support.          

            As of now, the Chat Morozova on the VK channel has not been blocked; and its editor, Morozov says, that he will not move to what might be a safer Telegram channel because far more Russians know how to interact with VK than are ready and able to use the latter means to get news and information.

            Morozov says that he asks those who go on his chat to be careful with their language lest officials target them and says that in the first 12 days of its operation, the chat has managed to protect at least one resident from forcible impressment into the Russian military and made far more aware of this danger.

            Commenting on this development, Aleksey Tabalov, who heads the School of the Conscript Project, said he welcomes what Morozov is doing because it will make it more difficult for the authorities to use their current forceful methods to raise men for the army in Ukraine.

            After this lesson from Penza, the activist says, officials are likely to become more careful and this new forceful mobilization will become “quiet and secretive,” with officials not risk acting brutally in public but instead visiting people in their homes or workplaces on the basis of lists provided by the draft agency.