Putin orders biggest autumn army call-up since 2016

MOSCOW (AFP): Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday called up 135,000 men for routine military service, the country’s biggest autumn conscription drive since 2016.

Russia calls up men aged between 18 and 30 for compulsory military service each spring and autumn.

Conscripts are expected to serve for a year at a military base inside Russia, not to fight in Ukraine, although there have been reports of conscripted men being sent to the front line. Russia’s annual conscription campaigns are unrelated to mobilisation, in which Russian men are drafted to fight during wartime.

But conscripts who have completed military training are more likely to be called up to fight in the future.

In a decree issued Monday, Putin ordered “the conscription of 135,000 citizens of the Russian Federation from October 1 to December 31, 2025”.

This is the biggest autumn conscription drive since 2016, and, combined with the 160,000 called up in the spring, means 2025 is set to be the largest total call-up since that year too.

Russia typically calls up more men in the spring, when most people graduate from school or college.

Since launching his full-scale military assault on Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has put Russia on a war footing, boosting military spending to levels unseen since the Soviet era and expanding the size of the army.

Putin has increased the annual conscription drive by an average of about five percent each year since 2022.

In September 2024 he ordered the expansion of the military to 1.5 million active soldiers – one of the largest in the world.