On 9 May, Russia’s wet squib this year of a Victory Day, president Putin addressed his beleaguered troops in Ukraine directly. ‘There is nothing more important now than your combat effort,’ he said. ‘The security of the country rests on you today, the future of our statehood and our people depend on you.’ Readers of The Spectator may be interested to learn of the Russian state’s efforts to augment this crucial ‘defensive’ force.

One day last week in provincial Russia, I was awoken at 3 a.m. by the ping of a new email from Gosuslugi, a state portal that facilitates public services (e.g. getting a passport or even checking your kids’ grades at school). Gosuslugi has been much in the news of late: decisions have been mandated in the Duma that the portal should lose its ‘secular’ status and now be the means of issuing electronic military summons for the war in Ukraine. Should Russian citizens choose to ignore the call-up documents coming via Gosuslugi – binding as soon as they appear on your account – they will henceforth be formally blocked from driving vehicles, buying or selling real estate, applying for loans or leaving the country: hence Gosuslugi’s new nickname as a ‘Digital Gulag.’ It’s also down to be used for online voting in 2024’s presidential elections, though as many are now deleting their accounts to elude Big Brother’s grasp, this may prove tricky.

Was it the dreaded draft?

All this adds a certain frisson nowadays to receiving an email from the portal, and rather than turning over and going back to sleep I decided to open it. Was it the dreaded draft? An unpaid electricity or gas bill? No: it was the Russian Federation contacting me to remind me that: ‘On May 2, 2014, a tragedy occurred that we have no right to forget – the Khatyn of Odessa, in the flames of which a part of our Russian world perished.’

I myself needed no reminders, remembering 2 May 2014 vividly: a clash between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian activists that ended tragically in the Odessa Trades Unions Palace (42 people burnt to death). Khatyn meanwhile is the name of a small village in Belarus burnt to the ground in 1943 as a retaliation for German deaths at the hands of local partisans. This time, 149 people died – an event almost swallowed up till the 1960s, when the Soviet authorities decided to single it out with a large-scale memorial there. This was to erase the memory of Katyn, where 22,000 Polish POWs were executed by the Soviets in 1940, and whose name was nearly identical. Russian totalitarian propaganda had once again presented a part of the truth as the whole, exploiting the narrative of suffering and sacrifice.

But what of the propaganda in my in-tray? Under the thoughtful reminder of the Odessa tragedy eight years ago, Gosuslugi had appended a short poem, by one Olga Starushko, whose simpering, doom-laden versifying ran thus:

No one to wail for the dead:

A pillar of fire and smoke

Was rising over everyone

Who was shut in the temple.

No matter how the time flies

This fire keeps burning.

It reminded me in fact of Blaise Pascal’s ‘Jesus will be in agony even unto the end of the world / We must not sleep for the duration.’ But sleep I did, readers, wondering upon waking at the macabre nightmare I’d just had. But my inbox, when I went to it, confirmed it had all really happened.

Things got steadily worse. My wife phoned to say she’d found a strange white envelope in our mail-box emblazoned with the slogan ‘Together we shall win.’

‘Do I dare open it?’ she asked, both of us entertaining fears the spirits of Putin or Prigozhin would leap out of it and be impossible to get back in again. I gave a tentative yes.

It was an invitation, printed on expensive paper, to join Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries, with a morbid red and black logo on top and the words ‘Blood Honour Motherland Valour.’ It called for ‘Men from 21 to 60, no previous army draft required’, and promised a ‘contract with salary from 240K roubles pcm’ (about £2,400) and ‘good bonuses for results’ (as the life-expectancy of such soldiers can be measured in days or hours, this represents excellent value for the state). In return for my assent I would receive ‘best training with qualified instructors’, ‘life and health insurance’ (no comment necessary) as well as ‘best outfit and ammunition.’

‘We have proved ourselves to be men of execution,’ the missive went on (and indeed they have, with sledgehammer-deaths for deserters), ‘and as a team aiming at effective work and victory. Inform anyone about this letter who may be interested. Join our ranks and choose the side of justice!’

The effect of this finely honed epistle, which I must say got me hot under the collar with jingoistic zeal, sadly wore off after a couple of days. Prigozhin alas had changed his tune, railing at the generals – against an infinity of dead soldiers lying on the ground – for woefully undersupplying his troops. ‘Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the f*** is the ammo? You sit, creatures, in your expensive clubs…. They volunteered and are dying for you while you get fat in your redwood offices. Wise up!’

The ‘best outfit and ammunition’ would have to wait. Given Prigozhin’s additional tirade on 9 May – about the ‘deplorable situation at the front’ – I wondered whether any level of ‘health insurance’ beyond not actually going there would be enough.

‘But there is some good news, too,’ my wife told me in the evening, ‘The government has announced additional payments to couples who have remained in marriage for more than 20 years.’

We gave each other a stonily contemplative look. Unless I decide to throw in my lot with Prigozhin’s ill-equipped renegades, that’s another decade she and I are committed to each other – before the ‘good bonus for results’ comes in.