Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Russia’s push to fill army ranks is turning up where Moscow’s teenagers hang out on Saturday nights.
Around 8 p.m. on Saturday, November 7, roughly 10 police vans pulled up at Gorka Park on Bolshoi Spasoglinishchevsky Lane in Moscow’s Kitai-Gorod neighborhood, a weekend gathering spot for young people in the center of the capital. Officers began loading teenagers and twenty-somethings into the vans and drove them to the Tagansky district police station.
By the time most detainees were released, the evening had ended with more than public-drinking citations. Adult men had been pressed to sign contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry, and some students with official conscription deferments walked out holding summonses ordering them to report to a military enlistment office on November 9.
From a “preventive measure” to army papers
Russian independent outlets and anti-war projects put the number taken to police stations between 150 and 300, most of them young people, including minors. At least 17 were cited for drinking alcohol in public, and others were charged with disobeying police.
The Interior Ministry described the operation as a “preventive measure” aimed at public order and alcohol consumption. It did not explain why detainees held on administrative grounds were then handed military paperwork or steered toward contract service.
Detainees gave consistent accounts of rough handling once they were inside the vans and at the station. One 15-year-old told Russian-language outlets that officers had beaten those detained, and girls said their phones had been damaged. Another teenager reported being struck in the area of his only kidney, according to Ukraine Today, citing UNIAN. Minors were held for hours while parents waited outside; a crowd in front of one station shouted “We pay your salaries! Freeloaders!” according to Meduza.
Yekaterina Mizulina, who heads the pro-Kremlin Safe Internet League, posted that she was watching the videos too. “I don’t understand why the parents of minors aren’t being let inside,” she wrote in comments carried by the independent outlet Meduza.
Part of a wider 2026 pattern
Kitai-Gorod has been raided repeatedly this year. The independent project Post-, cited by Meduza, counted six major sweeps targeting young people in the neighborhood since the start of 2026.
The pressure to sign contracts fits a nationwide pattern. In June, exiled outlets documented coordinated street raids in Penza, where security forces stopped cars and public transport to force men into Defense Ministry contracts, The Moscow Times reported, citing the human rights project Idite Lesom and the exiled outlet Mediazona.
By late summer, cases had spread across dozens of Russian regions. “There were only isolated round-ups in July, now we are at a peak,” Idite Lesom representative Ivan Chuvilyaev told Euronews in August, when the project logged 14 forced-recruitment appeals in the first half of the month alone. Russia is losing roughly 30,000 personnel a month in Ukraine while signing about 27,000 new contract soldiers, according to figures cited in the same report.
Moscow’s city government has not commented on why a public-order operation produced a batch of army summonses on November 9.
