A total of 300,000 reservists will be called up to fight in the Ukraine conflict, the Russian defense minister has said.
Russia will call on 300,000 reservists to serve in the conflict with Ukraine, under a partial nationwide mobilisation, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced on Wednesday. He added that Moscow has considerable capacity in terms of personnel.
According to Shoigu, the mobilisation will apply neither to university students, nor conscripts. The minister stressed that only those who have already served in the military will be called up.
“Those are not people who have never heard anything about the army. Those are those who, firstly, had completed their military service, secondly, those who have a military specialty… and have military experience,” he noted.
Shoigu also stressed that Russia possesses an immense mobilisation capability and could summon almost 25 million people with some military experience. “So one could say that this partial mobilization is just 1%, or a bit more” of the total number of people that could be mobilised, he added.
The defense minister noted that the line of contact between Moscow and Ukraine’s forces is more than 1,000 km long, and the mobilisation would be used for defending it.
“It is natural that this line should be reinforced and those territories (held by Russia) should be controlled. Of course, this is the purpose of this work,” he said, referring to the mobilization effort.
Earlier on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilisation, describing the move as sensible and necessary due to the military campaign in Ukraine. He pledged that those who are called up will be provided with additional training and benefits.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
Anybody who knows what has been happening in the Ukraine since 2014 understands the real stink is coming from a US/NATO alliance. There are ugly factions in the US which will never give up their ravenous appetite for Russian resources. They have been at it since 1918. Once again Russia has rejected America’s neoliberal drive to privatize and sell off Russian natural resources and public infrastructure. America is in debt to the tune of $US32 trillion, the debt is unrepayable, and Russian resources are the way out. Russia has said no. If we look back at what happened in Iraq, Libya, Syria and the wealthy parts of Africa, it is always the US trying to live at the expense of other countries, stealing their resources whilst pauperising the native population. They even did it to us via Roger Douglas. If the US can’t get what they want by a form of ‘neoliberalism democracy’ which means installing a puppet like little Zelensky and owning the country by proxy they will go in to ‘save’ it and introduce ‘democracy’ down the barrel of a rifle.