President Vladimir Putin has called up 160,000 men aged 18-30, Russia’s highest number of conscripts since 2011, as the country moves to expand the size of its military.

The spring call-up for a year’s military service came several months after Putin said Russia should increase the overall size of its military to almost 2.39 million and its number of active servicemen to 1.5 million.

That is a rise of 180,000 over the coming three years.

Vice Adm Vladimir Tsimlyansky said the new conscripts would not be sent to fight in Ukraine for what Russia calls its “special military operation”.

However, there have been reports of conscripts being killed in fighting in Russia’s border regions and they were sent to fight in Ukraine in the early months of the full-scale war.

The current draft, which takes place between April and July, comes despite US attempts to forge a ceasefire in the war.

There was no let-up in the violence on Tuesday, with Ukraine saying that a Russian attack on a power facility in the southern city of Kherson had left 45,000 people without electricity.

Although Russia has turned down a full US-brokered ceasefire with Ukraine, it says it did agree to stop attacking Ukraine’s energy facilities. In an apparent attempt to deny Moscow had broken the terms of that deal, Russian officials said they had told Putin that Ukrainian drones had carried out attacks with little sign of a break.

Russia calls up conscripts in the spring and autumn but the latest draft of 160,000 young men is 10,000 higher than the same period in 2024.

Since the start of last year, the pool of young men available for the draft has been increased by raising the maximum age from 27 to 30.

As well as call-up notices delivered by post, Russia’s young men will be receiving notifications on the state services website Gosuslugi.

In Moscow there were reports that call-ups had already been sent out on 1 April via the mos.ru city website.

Increasing numbers of Russians are trying to avoid the army by taking on “alternative civilian service”. But human rights lawyer Timofey Vaskin warned on independent Russian media that every new call-up since the start of the war had become a lottery: 

“Authorities are coming up with new forms of refilling the army.”

Quite apart from its twice-yearly draft, Russia has also called up large numbers of men as contract soldiers and recruited thousands of soldiers from North Korea.

Moscow has had to respond to extensive losses in Ukraine, with more than 100,000 verified by the BBC and Mediazona as soldiers killed in Ukraine.

The true number could be more than double.

Putin has scaled up the size of the military three times since he ordered troops to capture Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia’s defence ministry linked the December 2023 increase in the size of the military to “growing threats” from both the war in Ukraine and the “ongoing expansion of Nato”.

Nato has expanded to include Finland and Sweden, as a direct result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Finland has Nato’s longest border with Russia, at 1,343km (834 miles) and Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said on Tuesday that his country would join other states neighbouring Russia in pulling out of the Ottawa convention banning anti-personnel mines.

Poland and the Baltic states made similar decisions two weeks ago because of the military threat from Russia.

Orpo said the decision to resume using anti-personnel mines was based on military advice, and that the people of Finland had nothing to worry about.

The government in Helsinki also said defence spending would be increased to 3% of economic output (GDP), up from 2.4% last year.

Source: BBC
--Agencies