Mobilisation of reservists to end in two weeks, says Putin
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin has said he expects a mobilisation of army reservists he ordered last month to bolster his country’s troops in Ukraine to be completed in two weeks.
Mr Putin told reporters after attending a summit in Kazakhstan that 222,000 of the 300,000 reservists the Russian defence ministry said would be called up have been mobilised.
A total of 33,000 of them are already in military units and 16,000 are involved in combat, the Russian leader said.
The call-up, announced by Putin in September, has proved hugely unpopular in Russia, where almost all men under the age of 65 are registered as reservists.
At the same time, the Kremlin has faced domestic criticism of its handling of the war, increasing pressure on Putin to do more to turn the tide in Russia’s favour.
The Russian leader initially described the mobilisation as “partial” and said only those with combat or service experience would be drafted. However, a decree he signed outlined almost no specific criteria.
Russian media reports have described attempts to round up men without the relevant experience, including those ineligible for service for medical reasons. In the wake of the president’s mobilisation order, tens of thousands of men left Russia.
Putin also said yesterday there was no need for more widespread attacks against Ukraine, such as those Russia launched on Monday in retaliation for a truck bomb explosion last Saturday on the Kerch Bridge bridge linking Russia to Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia has promised free accommodation to residents of Ukraine’s partially occupied Kherson region who want to evacuate to Russia, a sign that Ukrainian military gains along the war’s southern front are worrying the Kremlin.
The Moscow-installed leader of Kherson, one of four regions illegally annexed by Putin last month, asked the Kremlin to organise an evacuation from four cities, citing incessant shelling by Ukrainian forces.
Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Moscow-appointed regional administration, said a decision was made to evacuate Kherson residents to the Russian regions of Rostov, Krasnodar and Stavropol, as well as to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The evacuation offer came as Ukrainian forces pushed deeper into the Kherson region, albeit at a slower pace than a few weeks ago. A similar campaign in eastern Ukraine resulted in most of the Kharkiv region returning to Ukrainian control, as well as parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the ministry said.
In the last 24 hours, at least nine civilians were killed and 15 were wounded, the Ukrainian president’s office said. The victims included an 11-year-old boy and six other people who died after a missile strike in the city of Mykolaiv, where a residential building was destroyed.
Also yesteriday, Russian forces carried out at least four missile strikes on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second- largest city.