Russia and Ukraine step up their recruitment, preparing for the fighting ahead

With their soldiers fighting and dying in muddy trenches, ruined cities and vast minefields, Russia and Ukraine have escalated recruitment campaigns to bolster their badly depleted armies, in another sign that both sides are preparing for a long war.

The President of Russia, Vladimir Putinsigned a decree on Thursday authorizing a higher-than-normal spring intake, with a target of about 147,000 menabout 10% higher than the target of the spring 2022 Russian campaign.

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While the new recruits are unlikely to go to the battlefield immediately — and a Russian official said they wouldn’t be sent at all — the recruitment will create a larger pool of potential troops for the Russian military, which has suffered huge losses.

Ukraine, which is also trying to replenish its ranks, said it had received more than 35,000 applications for a new force it is forming, the Offensive Guards.

To attract volunteers, the Ukrainian government put up posters and billboards across the country for several weeks announcing its plan to create a network of combat brigades working under the Interior Ministry alongside the regular armed forces.

The moves to rebuild the militaries of Russia and Ukraine have come with other signs that the countries, along with their supporters, are entrenching themselves on each other’s sides.

A spokesman for Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, said on Friday that the Belarusian asked immediate ceasefire in Ukraine it would not affect the Russian army.

“Nothing changes in the context of Ukraine, the special military operation continues, because it is the only means of achieving the goals that our country has today,” he told reporters, according to Russian and Western intelligence services.

The detention by Russian authorities on Thursday of an American journalist accused of espionage was widely interpreted in the West as a ploy to put pressure on the United States, and the President of Belarus, echoing Putin, warned Friday of the prospect of war nuclear. .

FinlandFor its part, it has cleared the last hurdle to join NATO, bringing alliance territory closer to a long stretch of the Russian border.

Meanwhile, Western weapons continue to flow into Ukraine, where authorities say they will soon launch a counter-offensive to recapture lost territory to the east and south.

The recent Russian offensive has had difficulty making its way into eastern Ukraine and Western analysts are debating whether the Russian army, after suffering heavy losses, is capable of mounting another one or holding off a Ukrainian attack.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia are disclosing their casualty figures, but Western officials and analysts say both have suffered huge losses in their armies.

US officials have estimated that some 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion began last February, and that Ukraine has had more than 100,000 victims.

The last few weeks of bloody battles in the east, especially in cities and towns alike Bakhmut and Avdiivka, they cost Ukraine large numbers of troops, including some of its most experienced fighters.

US officials said last month that sometimes hundreds of soldiers Ukrainians were being wounded or killed every day.

Since Russia’s invasion of the country, the Ukrainian government has been reaching out to all levels of society to fill the ranks, providing a steady stream of motivated soldiers, in contrast to Russia’s mix of contract soldiers, conscripts, convicts and mercenaries .

Twice a year, also starting in April, the Russian military enlists young men for a year’s training and service.

Even after Putin’s army depleted its reserves during last year’s months of fighting, it resisted larger national conscription for much of last year, ordering only a “partial” mobilization of some 300,000 men in September , After big defeats on the battlefield.

That conscription caused tens of thousands of Russian men to flee the country, and many of those drafted were taken to war, which the Kremlin continues to refer to as a “special military operation.”

Though it has stifled dissent within Russia,

Putin remains sensitive to public opinion and has faced regular outrage from relatives of soldiers and sailors, for example after the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship in the spring and during forced conscription last fall.

This week, Russian authorities appeared to be trying to allay concerns that the new recruits would soon end up in combat.

“None of the soldiers summoned will be sent to the special military operation area,” Vladimir Tsimlyansky, rear admiral of the Russian army general staff, told Russian state television on Friday, in statements also reported by other state agencies.

“The number of soldiers recruited and mobilized is fully sufficient to achieve the goals we have set ourselves.”

The authorities gave similar assurances on the September mobilization, saying the additional troops would not be used at the front, but within days some were killed in action.

There has been much speculation in Russia about another large-scale call-up, but Tsimlyansky added in another statement:

“I want to assure everyone that there is no second wave of mobilization in the plans of the General Staff.”

Russia continues to draw on reservists, seasoned soldiers and convicts eager to break out of prison to fight in its war in Ukraine.

But authorities have urged some recruits to stay in the army after their year of compulsory service, offering them cash bonuses as an incentive.

The Kremlin has also tried to increase pressure on Ukraine’s Western backers, but its options for doing so have narrowed in 13 months of war. Europe has largely ceased to depend on Russian oil and gas, and Moscow has failed to deliver on its often vague promises of retaliation.

Many Western officials and analysts believe the detention of American journalist Evan Gershkovich, by The Wall Street Journal, and the Kremlin’s declarations on nuclear weapons are attempts to find new means of pressure.

Russia has often used jailed Westerners as bargaining chips, as it did last year when it arrested and prosecuted basketball player Brittney Griner on drug charges.

Moscow has finally secured the release of a Russian arms dealer imprisoned in the United States in a prisoner exchange with Griner negotiated with the Biden administration.

The White House and a coalition of news organizations, including The Journal and The New York Times, have condemned Gershkovich’s detention and defended him as a respected journalist.

The Moscow government had expelled some Western journalists, mostly since the start of the invasion, but hadn’t arrested or charged them since 1986, during the Cold War.

And less than a week after Putin said he would plant nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, the Belarusian president on Friday joined his close ally in raising the prospect of nuclear war.

Because of the conflict in Ukraine, President Alexander Lukashenko he told Belarusian lawmakers that “a third world war looms on the horizon with nuclear fires”.

Putin has repeatedly raised the specter of using nuclear weapons, a prospect that many analysts see as bluster intended to inflame fear and pressure Western leaders to stop arms deliveries to Ukraine.

But Lukashenko, while depending almost entirely on Russia for economic, political and security aid, has also apparently resisted fully embracing the Kremlin’s ambitions.

Although it allowed the Russian military to use Belarus as a base for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, it has so far refrained from sending its own soldiers to help Russia on the battlefield.

c.2023 The New York Times Society