Airline tickets departing from Russia in the coming days are close to sold out and prices have skyrocketed after Putin announced the "partial mobilization" that will involve some 300,000 reservists.

The most popular flights are those to countries such as Georgia, Turkey or Armenia , which allow Russians to enter without a visa. And in Russia fear is spreading that the authorities may soon ban enlisted men from leaving the country .

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has specified that the mobilization for the so-called will for now involve 300,000 reservists and that students and conscripts will not be called. But, according to the Moscow Times, human rights lawyers point out that the decree leaves room for maneuver to draw in more troops than publicly stated .

Russian Railways and national airline Aeroflot were quick to say they have received no provisions to prevent men aged 18-65 from buying their tickets, but prices have soared and Google searches have more than doubled. in the last few hours. Getting on the Moscow-Istanbul with Turkish Airlines, for example, now costs 172,790 rubles, or more than 2,800 euros .

According to the CNBC, there are no tickets available until Thursday even for Belgrade, the only European capital to have direct air connections with Russia since the government of Serbia has not adhered to the sanctions. The cheapest ticket from Russia to Belgrade on Friday costs almost 2,900 euros , while - again according to Cnbc - its price usually ranges between 835 and 1,945 euros.

Some videos on social media instead show long queues of cars on the border between Russia and Finland.

Helsinki will in fact try to limit or completely block the transistence of "Russian tourists" on its soil , given that Poland and the three Baltic countries have been preventing Russian citizens with tourist visas from entering since the beginning of September.

The new measures, Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said, "could include new legislation to be adopted very quickly or a more restrictive interpretation of current legislation".

At the moment, however, the Finnish authorities specify, denying the videos circulating on social networks, " traffic at the crossings is normal ".

THE PROTESTS

The mobilization has also rekindled street protests, over a thousand people were arrested today in various Russian cities , a budget set to increase rapidly.

To be precise, there have been demonstrations in at least 38 cities and according to the NGO Ovd-Info at least 1,026 people have been arrested. These are the largest protests in Russia since those following the announcement of the Moscow offensive in Ukraine at the end of February: at that time there were more than 16 thousand people arrested, almost all in the first month after the outbreak of the conflict.

And 290,000 signatures were collected in an online petition against the mobilization . “We Russian citizens, women and men, oppose general and partial mobilization. President Vladimir Putin has no legal basis, no well-considered and well-motivated reasons for announcing it and he cannot have any. In the current situation of uncertainty, we are not ready to expose the men of our country - brothers, children, husbands, fathers and grandparents - to moral, moral or physical dangers ”, say the authors of the petition according to Novaya Gazeta Europa.

(Unioneonline / L)

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