The Russian Government assures that it is not contemplating a new mobilization for the entrenched invasion of Ukraine, but at the same time it is paving the way to swell the ranks of the army. The Russian Ministry of Defense wants to have at its disposal as many civilians as possible and from the end of next year it will exclude as a reason to avoid conscription “those diseases that do not have a significant impact on the military capacity” of the person called up for military service. Which ones are not specified. In line with the same objective, President Vladimir Putin has decreed an increase in the theoretical personnel of the Armed Forces – figures that do not necessarily correspond to the actual strength of the army – to 2.2 million members.
Casualties and fatigue are accumulating on the front and Russia will need more men if the war drags on, as the Kremlin predicts, which warns of an increase in “threats against Russia” linked to the “special military operation [nombre oficial de la invasión de Ucrania] and the ongoing expansion of NATO.” Moscow asserts that the initial objectives of the war have not changed.
“The special military operation will continue. Our economy has adapted and provides the necessary framework for its continuation,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, warned this Monday, after emphasizing that the Kremlin is waiting for the West to abandon Kiev to its fate. “It is clear that it is increasingly difficult for them to spend money on the bottomless Ukrainian barrel,” said the senior official.
A third of the Russian budget is allocated to military spending (40% if other security chapters are added) and Moscow is not content with the Ukrainian territory it has occupied until now. “We see no reason why our objectives should be reviewed,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded last Friday when asked during the last summit of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) about the lack of movement on the front lines.
According to the British Ministry of Defense, Russian forces in the last two months in their offensive on Avdiivka (in eastern Ukraine) have suffered wear similar to or greater than that of the Battle of Bakhmut at the beginning of the year. Despite this, the Kremlin claims to have everything under control. The vice chairman of the Russian Security Council and former president of the country, Dmitry Medvedev, said this weekend that the army has hired more than 452,000 people this year. He did not specify whether that figure includes the integration since July of mercenaries and volunteers from groups like Wagner, ordered by the Ministry of Defense.
Health reasons were among the main allegations of young Russians who tried to avoid the first major mobilization in September 2022, when more than 300,000 civilians were called up. The Ministry of Defense now points out in its draft decree that it has taken note of “the experience gained” in Ukraine. That recruitment was chaotic and there were thousands of complaints from those mobilized. Although Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated that only those with military experience who were part of the reserve would be called up, the mobilization decree did not specify this and there were cases in recruiting centers in which attempts were made to force them to serve. in Ukraine to civilians who had a medical certificate that should exempt them.
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Proposal to expand the military
The reduction of the list of diseases exempt from conscription will not only facilitate the mobilization of civilians, but will also extend to the recruitment of professional military personnel and the annual call-ups of young people for compulsory military service. In fact, some Russian legislators have put on the table extending the military service up to two years to have more troops available. Andrei Guruliov, deputy, lieutenant general and member of the Defense Committee of the State Duma, has also proposed eliminating study centers to encourage the entry of Russians into the Armed Forces, since being in the training process serves to postpone military service. mandatory.
Putin is also preparing an army that can confront NATO in the medium term. Last Friday, the Kremlin changed by decree the maximum number of members in the Armed Forces and raised it to 2.2 million members, 1.3 million of them potential combatants. This is not the first time that Russia has modified this limit: the president already did so in 2000 and 2010 when reforming the disproportionate military structure inherited from the USSR, and he did it again in August 2022, by increasing the limit by 130,000 soldiers for six months. after beginning the invasion of Ukraine, after seeing that it would drag on.
The Ministry of Defense explained in a statement that the review of the theoretical dimension of the Armed Forces “is due to the increase in threats against Russia linked to the special military operation and the ongoing expansion of NATO.” Added to the wear and tear suffered on the battlefields of Ukraine is the incorporation of Finland and its more than 1,300 kilometers of border with Russia into the Alliance in April of this year, and the future accession of Sweden, still pending final approval by from Turkey and Hungary.
More police raids
Another indication of a possible short-term mobilization is that Russian police have in recent months intensified raids on mosques, markets and factories to recruit potential recruits among immigrants who have dual nationality. The target is those from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, who form the majority of the migrant community in Russia. After receiving nationality, some of them did not formalize another mandatory document, the so-called military ticketa registry with which the Ministry of Defense has at hand the profile of potential recruits.
Last August, more than a hundred workers at a St. Petersburg vegetable market were detained and taken to a training center to complete this procedure. “To take advantage of this opportunity to further educate Russians,” the police said in their statement about the immigrants, “citizenship confers not only rights, but also responsibilities, including the constitutional obligation to perform military service.”
These types of records have occurred in recent weeks in one of the largest logistics companies in the country, Wildberries, an alternative to Amazon in Russia. This past weekend the last one took place in a warehouse in the Tula region, south of Moscow, where a dozen employees were detained “for a routine verification of documents as part of military recruitment,” the company alleged to make light of it. . At the end of November, Wildberries saw its more than 8,000 employees stop work for a few hours after learning of the first raid, in which more than 40 workers were taken from the communal dormitory where they lived to the recruitment center.
Another notorious case took place last October, when Mamut Useinov, star of a well-known television singing competition, was arrested in a Moscow mosque. According to his version, he, along with others, was put on a bus and held for hours in a recruitment center. “I was forcibly taken away, my documents were illegally confiscated and I did not have the opportunity to appeal or report my illnesses and beliefs,” he lamented on his personal Instagram account. “They told us we had to sign a contract for one year or we would go to prison,” Useinov added. According to his story, several of those arrested agreed to join the army.
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