Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 27 – After Ukrainian forces entered Kursk Oblast in August, the Russian Defense Ministry established special BARS Detachments alongside the existing territorial units in border regions, detachments allowing regional elites to portray themselves as patriotic without risk of fighting and to enrich themselves while most people suffer, ‘Horizontal Russia’ says.
Moscow presents these special detachments as expansions of the territorial defense forces that had been set up earlier (rg.ru/2024/09/05/reg-cfo/v-belgorodskoj-oblasti-poiavitsia-dobrovolcheskij-otriad-bars-belgorod.html); but in fact, the regional agency says, the two are very different (t.me/gubernator_46/9672 reposted at semnasem.org/articles/2024/10/28/otryady-dlya-elity-chto-takoe-bars-i-pochemu-lyudi-ot-vlasti-massovo-vstupayut-v-eti-voennye-podrazdeleniya).
The territorial forces recruited people with significantly lower bonuses and sent them into combat on occasion, while the BARS units offered enormous bonuses and largely restricted enrollment to the elite, allowing them to engage in PR and take home enormous payments without the risk that they will be sent to fight in Ukraine or even against Ukrainian forces.
According to specialists on regional politics, the local populations increasingly recognizing how elites are using the BARS units and thus are becoming more hostile to them and even to the broader war effort, which now looks to many of them less as a national act than a means to further enrich the elites at their expense.
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