Russia appears to be laying the groundwork to summon hundreds of thousands more men across the country to take part in the war against Ukraine.
Lawmaker Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the State Duma’s Defense Committee, lamented in an interview with RBK on Wednesday that the country doesn’t have enough mobilized reserve forces for a “large-scale war.”
Current reserve forces, he said, are enough to “meet the demands that stand before the government,” but “it’s impossible to completely do without the reservists in the case of a large-scale war.”
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His comments come a few days after another member of the Defense Committee, retired general Andrei Gurulyov, called for boosting the mobilized reserves “in case of an attack by Poland.”
The message behind Kartapolov’s latest remarks seemed clear even to pro-Kremlin figures.
“If Kartapolov wanted to say that in the conditions of a big war on two fronts (which is quite likely), the mobilized reserve system will not cope and Russia will have to declare a general mobilization, well, it should have been said that way. Why all this pointless juggling with words?” pro-war pundit Sergey Mardan wrote on Telegram.
Reserve forces are automatically sent to fight when the Russian president declares a mobilization. The Defense Ministry does not disclose the number of its reservists.
Talk of a fresh call-up of troops across the country has been circulating in Russia for weeks, and Estonian intelligence reported last week they’d learned of an order for thousands of new call-up notices in one Russian region.
Fears of a new call-up are so widespread that scammers are now sending out bogus lists of “people who will be mobilized” as part of a phishing scheme to steal personal data, one Telegram channel specializing in mobilization said Wednesday.
But there are signs that those fears are warranted. Last week, an obscure group calling itself the “Soldiers’ Widows” started a social media campaign calling on the Russian president to declare a general mobilization and block all military-age men from leaving the country, a move that many suspected may have been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
“Now is not the time to get cold feet,” the group wrote, encouraging Putin to be more like Josef Stalin, who “didn’t think about any ratings” in his quest for “victory.”
