"Now we're all going home," a 25-year-old man is said to have shouted before he shot the local military commissioner in the city of Ust-Ilimsk in the Siberian region of Irkutsk on Monday afternoon.

The latter was seriously wounded, according to the authorities.

Video recordings from the military replacement office are said to show the incident;

victim collapses, people run away screaming.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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Media initially reported that the shooter who was arrested had himself received a call-up order;

But then the young man's mother was quoted as saying that it was not her son who had been summoned, but his best friend.

Her son was "very upset because his friend didn't serve in the army.

They said it's going to be a partial mobilization and it turns out they're taking all of them."

Last Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin spoke of a "partial mobilization" of reservists, especially those who had served in the armed forces and had relevant experience.

However, numerous cases have come to light in which Russians who do not meet these criteria have been conscripted.

The attack on the military commissioner in Ust-Ilimsk is the most serious incident so far in the mobilization campaign, which began immediately after Putin's speech.

Since then, arson attacks have been carried out on at least eleven military replacement offices, as well as attacks on a number of administrative buildings.

That doesn't fit the official image of a patriotic awakening.

Defense Ministry and state television are circulating footage of Russians serious but confident reporting to military enlistment offices or leaving in buses to take them to training courses -- promises have been made that the "mobilized" would be prepared before being sent to the front.

Rumors of exit bans are fueling the wave of departures

The situation on Russia's land borders also does not fit into this picture.

In some places there are long queues of cars.

The FSB secret service, which is also responsible for border protection, even sent an infantry fighting vehicle to a crossing between the Republic of North Ossetia and Georgia on Monday, at which the line is said to have been 20 kilometers on Monday morning.

This is done in the event that "reservists break through the checkpoint and want to leave the country without all the formalities," the FSB said.

Reports about individual travel bans and rumors about an imminent general travel ban for reservists after the end of the "referendums" on Tuesday evening about the annexation of other areas of Ukraine are fueling the wave of departures.

The exile offshoot of Russia's Novaya Gazeta, citing a source in the presidential administration, reported that 261,000 men left Russia between Putin's mobilization announcement and last Saturday evening.

In the presidential administration, it is assumed that the top security forces and the defense ministry could convince Putin to impose exit bans “as long as it is not too late”.

Putin's spokesman was asked on Monday whether a state of war would be considered in some regions.

"At present" no such decisions have been made, said Dmitry Peskov.

Regarding reports of license plate lists that are not allowed to leave the country, Peskov said Russia's "enemies" as well as "our domestic hysterics" are spreading fake news that one has to be careful.