When Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilisation of Russian reservists and the need for 300,000 fighters to join his war in Ukraine, he insisted the men would be summoned according to strict criteria.
Now, there is a clearer picture of where the reinforcements are coming from and there are widespread claims all is not equal.
The young tech workers of St Petersburg and the sons of Moscow’s elite are less likely to be on the front line in Ukraine because, as with so many things in Russia, money and power talk.
There are claims orders to join the war are being issued along racial, regional and class lines and there have been egregious examples of how little those in Mr Putin's inner circle believe his war concerns them.
Analysts say the inequity of the partial mobilisation poses a few new risks for Mr Putin and exposes old truths about the Russia he has built.
'They're taking everyone'
When Mr Putin signed the executive order "calling up citizens of the Russian Federation", the task then became finding 300,000 men who would be forced to answer the call.
That number was divided among various commands and then regional leaders were, according to local media, given a number of men they needed to round up and contribute to the overall draft.
"So, if you were in charge of military recruitment for your town, you might be told, 'OK you have to get 100 or 500 people onto the bus to head for the recruitment centre,' but those were not evenly distributed across the country," said Jennifer Mathers, an expert in Russian politics, history and security at Aberystwyth University.
"They've gone disproportionately to the parts of the country which are more deprived, which have sent the military more people, possibly, because they felt that it was more fruitful recruiting ground."
In Buryatia — a rural region in eastern Siberia — the mobilisation has seen some men drafted regardless of their age, military record or medical history, according to local residents, officials and activists.
The region is home to ethnic Buryats, a mostly Buddhist people closely related to Mongolians.
Buryat rights activists suspect that the burden of the mobilisation — and the war itself — is falling on poor, ethnic minority regions to avoid triggering popular anger in Moscow, which is 6,000km away.
"There's nothing partial about the mobilisation in Buryatia," said Alexandra Garmazhapova, president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, an organisation that provides legal help to those mobilised.
"They are taking everyone.
"The federal centre is trying not to touch St Petersburg and Moscow, because in Moscow you can have protests against the Kremlin."
Enlisted for their invaders
In Crimea, there are claims the draft is disproportionately targeting Crimean Tatars, a Muslim minority group that makes up a small proportion of the region's population.
Crimea SOS, an NGO assisting Crimean citizens to resettle in Ukraine, said that move could be in breach of a Geneva Convention, which states an occupying power cannot compel its subjects to serve in its armed forces.
In a cruel twist, Crimea SOS claims Crimean men who have been forcibly issued a Russian passport are now "hostages" to Russian conscription in a war against their own people.
"The Crimean Tatars are citizens and an Indigenous people of Ukraine, whom Russia can purposefully destroy by throwing them into a war against their own state," Crimea SOS analyst Yevgeny Yaroshenko said.
The NGO estimated that on the first day of mobilisation, "at least 5,000 people" were drafted in Crimea.
"According to preliminary estimates, Crimean Tatars received about 90 per cent of summonses. At the same time, Crimean Tatars make up 13 - 15 per cent of the population of the peninsula," it said.
"Such scale of mobilisation can lead to a hidden genocide of the Crimean Tatar people."
Meanwhile in the region of Dagestan, protesters have clashed with police and been detained as villages reportedly have refused to comply with the mobilisation orders.
Mr Putin's partial mobilisation follows a similar trend to general military recruitment in Russia, according to Dr Mathers.
"If you look at the way that the military has been, over the past several years ... it does draw disproportionately from these areas, which are predominantly not ethnic Russian," she said.
"They're also relatively socio-economically deprived, so it's the poor regions, where there aren't many other opportunities for jobs for young people. For lots of young men, the military is a way out."
According to some data, it's men from the poorest regions who are also least likely to make it home again.
Russian investigative outlet iStories reports that soldiers from Buryatia and Dagestan have suffered the highest casualty rate in the conflict so far.
Peskov's prank call
While people in the remote regions continue to bury their sons, the children of Moscow's elite are being caught out planning to evade the draft.
In one example, a prank call to the son of Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was recorded and shared on YouTube.
The callers are opposition figures, but pose as military officers calling Nikolai Peskov about a summons to appear at an enlistment office the following morning.
"You should understand that I'm Mr Peskov and how it is not exactly right for me to be there," Nikolai says to the prank callers.
"I'll be solving this on another level."
The video has bounced around Russian Telegram channels and fuelled concerns the impacts of mobilisation are being felt very differently across the country.
At the same time, the mobilisation has been largely chaotic in Russia, with public irritation, even among officials and pro-Kremlin commentators, at the large number of unsuitable or ostensibly ineligible people being given call-up papers.
The Kremlin said mistakes would be corrected, but the seeds of suspicion had been planted.
And all this is while thousands of men flee Russia and its mobilisation for fear of being called up, and of the president closing the country's borders.
The risks for Putin
The Russian leader's decision to call up reservists has been blasted around the world as an "act of desperation" by a commander-in-chief watching his side slowly lose ground in a war which he started.
Despite the size of the Russian military, there has always been a key difference in the mindset of the men on the ground in Ukraine.
Early in the war, there were reports of disillusionment among Russian soldiers, while the Ukrainian military and its volunteer regional defence forces have always known exactly what they're fighting for.
And they have impressed the world with their resolve.
Analysts have noted that until the mobilisation, support for the war among the Russian population had not been tested because Mr Putin's people had not been asked to participate in it.
"What we've seen up until now has been a very high proportion of Russians who have just not wanted to know about the war — sort of passive support," Dr Mathers said.
"If they're asked, they'll say, ‘Yeah, of course, I support the war,' but they may not [be] enthusiastic."
There are now questions about how useful the 300,000 conscripts will be.
The mobilisation "may address a manpower issue for Russia," Pentagon press secretary General Patrick Ryder said in a press conference.
"What's not clear is whether or not it could significantly address the command and control, the logistics, the sustainment and importantly, the morale issues that we've seen Russian forces in Ukraine experience."
As well as risking discontent at home for little military gain, Mr Putin could be jeopardising the strength of his inner circle as fears about full conscription take hold.
Russian journalist and political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya recently wrote that the elite class was "cracking at the seams over whether Russia is willing to pay any price for defeating Ukraine".
"Full-scale mobilisation with the prospect of internal instability and a new wave of repression, an unwinding spiral of sanctions and growing isolation, falling export revenues and an erosion of the budgetary system — all this raises the question: where is Russia ready to stop?" she wrote.
"And is there even such a price that the Kremlin will no longer pay for Ukraine?
"Apparently, Putin and the Russian elites have very different answers to these questions."
ABC/Reuters
