Another 160,000 soldiers for Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has signed a decree for the spring draft with which Moscow plans to recruit 160,000 men between the ages of 18 and 30. The conscription, starting today until July 15, is the largest in the last 14 years and represents a clear signal for a country engaged for 3 years in the war against Ukraine.
Conscripts are not normally sent to the front to fight. In reality, in relation to the ongoing conflict, the presence of conscripts at the front has been reported several times. In particular, conscripts would have been deployed in Kursk, the region invaded by the Ukrainian armed forces since August 2024.
The Russian Defense Ministry now says conscripts will not be sent to units deployed in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which Russia partially controls and has annexed to its territory anyway. The new recruits will be sent to their destinations starting April 10, as explained by Rear Admiral Vladimir Tsimlyansky, number 2 of the Directorate that deals with organization and mobilization within the General Staff.
Negotiations to end the war are proceeding along a path conditioned by the stakes set by Moscow. The ceasefire proposed by the US was accepted by Ukraine. Russia, on the other hand, has apparently agreed to the truce for energy infrastructure and for the Black Sea. In reality, raids and attacks continue on a daily basis, with tactics that appear to be evolving.
An analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (Isw), a US-based think tank, highlights how over the weekend Russian forces hit a military hospital and civilian infrastructure in the city of Kharkiv. Russian military bloggers believed to be close to the Kremlin agree with a recent article in the German daily Bild that Russian forces have “changed their tactics of attacking with long-range drones and now have drones that hover several kilometers from their targets at high altitude” before conducting offensives with multiple unmanned aircraft.
“Military bloggers have further speculated that these tactics facilitated recent Russian drone strikes on Kharkiv, Odessa, and Dnipro,” Isw said.
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