Russians protesting against Vladimir Putin' s new recruitment drive have been witnessed setting fire to government buildings with Molotov cocktails.
A wave of protests have been witnessed across Russia after the Russian president announced the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine, with some men now leaving the country to try and dodge the draft.
At least 1,386 protestors have been arrested across 38 Russian cities, a ccording to human rights group OVD-Info, with photos circulating online of people holding "no to war" and "no mobilisation" placards.
The figures included at least 502 people in Moscow and 524 in St Petersburg, the country's second largest city.
Many of the protests saw small crowds expressing their rage, with one man in Novosibirsk shouting at police: "I am not going to die for Putin and for you."
Other areas saw more violent clashes, with local media in Tolyatti, western Russia, reporting that the door and ceiling of a city's government administration building had been set on fire at 3.44am local time on Thursday (September 22).
Fire crews took 20 minutes to extinguish the blaze, while officers are said to have found a number of Molotov cocktails.
Employees s peaking to local news site Neslukhi.rf said the porch sustained significant damage, while pictures shared online sh owed a number of windows smashed.
A military registration and enlistment office was also set ablaze in the town of Lomonosov near St Petersburg, according to reports.
Similar accounts emerged from the town of Gai, located near the border with Kazakhstan, and Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia.
Russian Interior Ministry official Irina Volk, in a statement quoted by Russian news agencies, said officers had stamped out attempts to stage what it called small protests.
"In a number of regions, there were attempts to stage unauthorised actions which brought together an extremely small number of participants"
"These were all stopped. And those persons who violated laws were detained and taken to police stations for investigation and establish their responsibility."
According to Newsweek, there have been more than a dozen attempts to set Russian military enlistment offices on fire since the beginning of the current conflict.
