President Vladimir Putin on Thursday Occurred An order allowing the Russian Defense Ministry to recruit 147,000 men for compulsory military service next spring.
The number of recruits to be called up this year represents an increase of 12,500 over last year’s hiring numbers.
The Ministry of Defense will start the recruitment campaign on Saturday, and it includes eligible men between the ages of 18 and 27. The recruitment campaign is scheduled to end on July 15.
Conscription officers are likely to crack down on draft dodgers in order to meet Putin’s ambitious target of 147,000, according to experts. quoted By the independent news agency Agentstvo.
Experts also said the pool of potential recruits born between 1995 and 2005 had grown insufficiently to meet the Army’s growing demand for freshmen, despite a steady rise in birth rates since 2000.
“There was definitely no increase [in birthrates]so the idea seems to be to attract as many people as possible [draft dodgers] as possible,” Ilya Kashnitsky, a professor of demography at the University of Southern Denmark, told Agnetstvo.
Russian demographer Alexei Raksha estimates that as many as 19% of the 770,000 men born in 2004 will send draft papers during this year’s spring recall.
If the fall draft is the same, a total of 38% of the 2004 generation [will be recruited] This year,” Raksha told Agentstvo.
The Russian General Staff said on Friday that none of the soldiers recruited in the latest conscription campaign will be sent to fight in Ukraine. The semi-annual draft allows recruits to be sent to fight abroad after only four months of military training.
Almost 400,000 contract soldiers are currently serving in the Russian Armed Forces.
Putin increased the call-up numbers for the spring after green-lighting Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s proposal in December to increase the number of Russian fighters from 1.15 million to 1.5 million.
The latest draft is expected to be one of the last before new rules that raise the minimum draft age to take effect to 30 in 2024. The minimum age will also gradually increase from 18 to 21 over the next three years.
