“Why are you taking our children? Who attacked who? Isn’t it Russia that attacked Ukraine?” The questions hurled at the police by a clamorous group of indignant women outside a theater in Dagestan’s capital That was last month the confrontation between infuriated mothers in Dagestan, a mountainous republic within the multi-national Russian Federation, took place shortly after Putin announced a partial mobilization. Elsewhere in the north Caucasian city, standoffs between protesters and baton-wielding police were fiercer with jostling and heavy-handed arrests, according to geo-located posted videos. Some other ethnic minority parts of the Russian Federation, including its 22 ethnic republics,...