Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the mobilization of reservists he ordered last month to reinforce troops in Ukraine will be completed in two weeks.
In press statements after attending a summit in Kazakhstan, the president assured that 220,000 of the 300,000 reservists summoned by the Ministry of Defense have already been mobilized. There are already 16,000 in Ukraine, he added.
The call-up announced by Putin in September has been wildly unpopular in Russia, where almost all men up to 65 are registered as reservists. The Kremlin has been met with criticism in Russia for the way the war has been handled.
Despite the fact that Putin and other top officials declared that the mobilization would affect some 300,000 people, the decree that the president signed to launch the recruitment did not mention a specific number. Russian media have indicated that the actual number could be as high as 1.2 million reservists.
The Russian president described the mobilization as “partial”, saying only men with combat or military service experience would be recruited. However, Russian press reports have mentioned attempts to recruit men without the required experience, including some who are unfit for service for health reasons.
Following Putin’s mobilization order, tens of thousands of men left Russia. Since then, reports have surfaced of recruits deployed to the Ukraine front lines with poor training and inadequate equipment.
Putin said that all activated conscripts should receive proper training and that he would assign the Russian Security Council “to conduct an inspection of how mobilized citizens are trained.”
On the other hand, he assured that the generalized attacks in Ukraine like those of last Monday, launched in response to the explosion on October 8 of a bridge that connects Russia with the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, would no longer be necessary.
The Kerch bridge explosion followed Ukraine’s liberation of occupied areas in the east and south of the country in several counter-offensives.
Moscow has promised free accommodation to residents of the Kherson region, partially occupied by its troops, who want to leave for Russia. An indication that the continued and sustained Ukrainian military advances on the southern front worry the Kremlin.
Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-installed governor of Kherson, one of the four regions annexed by Putin last month, asked the Kremlin to organize the evacuation of four cities due to incessant shelling by Ukrainian forces.
Governor Balance reported that a decision had been made to evacuate Kherson residents to the Russian regions of Rostov, Krasnodar and Stavropol, as well as to Crimea.
“We, the residents of the Kherson region, of course know that Russia does not abandon its own and always reaches out,” Saldo said in a video posted Thursday.
Russia has characterized the movement of Ukrainians to Russia or territory controlled by it as voluntary, but in many cases these are the only evacuation routes that inhabitants of the occupied areas can take or are allowed to use.
Reports have surfaced that some Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to “filtration camps” where harsh conditions prevail. In addition, an investigation by The Associated Press found that Russian authorities deported thousands of Ukrainian children — orphaned or living with foster families — to raise them as Russians.
As Ukrainian forces maintain counter-offensives in the east and south to liberate occupied areas, Russian troops have withdrawn from regions they occupied at the start of the invasion in late February.
Ukraine has recaptured 75 settlements in the region over the past month, the Ministry for the Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories reported Thursday night. A similar campaign in eastern Ukraine managed to return 502 settlements in the Kharkiv region, 43 in Donetsk and seven in Luhansk to Ukrainian control, the ministry said.
Putin annexed Kherson, neighboring Zaporizhia and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine after holding referendums that Western powers rejected.
The commander of the Ukrainian forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, has vowed that his forces will succeed in “taking back what is ours”.
“Nothing and no one will stop us,” he said in a video message. “We have buried the myth of the invincibility of the Russian army.”
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