When Russian President Vladimir Putin (70) announced the mobilization of some 300,000 reservists at the end of September, many in and around Russia were uneasy. Russian men fled their homeland en masse to escape conscription.
The Kremlin announced on Tuesday that the partial mobilization for military service in Ukraine had been completed. No new measures are planned, the organization said. According to Putin, as many as 318,000 men have been mobilized. This makes it unnecessary to end the mobilization by decree, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov (55) said.
Military experts at the American think tank “Institute for the Study of War” (ISW) are said to be bluffing with this claim. The Kremlin ruler will not be satisfied with the supposedly completed mobilization. Instead, Putin must covertly continue the mobilization.
Putin has not signed a decree officially ending mobilization
According to the ISW, the 300,000 mobilized men did not have enough troops to counter the Ukrainian armed forces advancing in many places. Decrees recently signed by President Vladimir Putin would indicate this. In addition, the Kremlin ruler would not have signed a decree officially ending the mobilization announced at the end of September.
According to the ISW, the Russian information is inconsistent with Putin’s decree this Friday, which also allows Russian authorities to bring in citizens awaiting convictions for serious crimes. In addition, Putin is said to have signed decrees to expand the list of conscripts to include men who served in volunteer formations and to make exceptions for the conscription of alternative conscripts.
The ISW experts interpreted the possibility of recruiting prisoners as an attempt to prevent further social tensions. There is great resistance among the Russian population to the movement of citizens. It is estimated that 400,000 men have now left the vast empire to avoid being drafted.
According to the US think tank, Russian opposition figures and online media reported that the authorities were preparing for a second wave of mobilization, for example by modernizing recruitment centers and preparing lists of possible recruits, despite claims by the Kremlin that the district replacement offices will no longer be allowed to line up in reservists. According to the report, individual men would also have received draft announcements for the coming year. (SDA/dzc)