Is Putin planning a second mobilization to call up 500,000 troops?

An advisor to Ukraine's Minister of Interior Affairs has publicly announced that Russia is preparing for a second wave of mobilization in the country. 

“The plan,” Anton Gerashchenko (pictured) Tweeted, “is to draft 500,000-700,000,” since the original 300,000 drafted back in September were already killed, wounded, or demoralized. 

Gerashchenko’s announcement came at a time when distinguishing between fact and fiction has become almost impossible. The current information war between Russia and Ukraine has both sides working diligently to undermine support on the homefront.

But it does seem that there may be some evidence to support a renewed draft. Regional leaders in Russia wrote Putin last week demanding that he stop mobilizing reservists to fight in Ukraine.

Emilia Slabunova, a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Karelia, posted a letter to her Telegram channel last week noting that current rumors of a renewed draft “affects the psychological state of society,” and is “a source of anxiety and increased anxiety in Russian families.”

Photo by Russian government @duma.gov.ru

Pro-Russian Telegram channels have also been abuzz with rumors of a second draft predicted to start in December or January.

"There is no doubt that a new wave of mobilization will begin in mid-January," wrote Kirill Goncharov, the deputy head of the Moscow branch of the Yabloko party on Telegram.

"They are still sending out call-up papers, they are still preventing people from leaving the country," Goncharov said. 

The Kremlin is not currently discussing the possibility of a second military mobilization in Russia according to Kremlin spokesperson Dimitri Peskov.

"There are no discussions about that," Peskov told reporters in his weekly press call, according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.

However, Peskov’s statement did not rule out the possibility of the Kremlin calling up the second round of conscripts to help fight the war in Ukraine. 

"I cannot speak for the Ministry of Defense.” Peskov said during the press call, “There are no discussions on this matter in the Kremlin." 

Andrei Kolesnikov, an expert on Russian domestic politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Moscow Times that a second mobilization is highly unlikely, "The level of anxiety across Russian society won't permit the Kremlin to undertake a second wave of mobilization." 

Independent security expert Rainer Saks agreed that mobilization was unlikely, stating in an interview with ERR news that it “would amount to taking a huge risk for Russian leaders.” But Saks hasn’t ruled it out altogether. 

Photo by Facebook @Embassy of Japan in Estonia

“We will have to see how the land lies after New Year's,” Saks told ERR News. 

But news regarding a new mobilization might be coming quicker than some analysts have predicted. 

Leaked documents uncovered by Vazhnye Istorii from the independent Russian investigative media outlet Important Sources have revealed that the Kremlin is expecting to suffer an irreversible loss of 100,000 troops during the winter campaign in Ukraine. 

"Up to 100,000 soldiers might be killed or injured by next spring. But no one is worried about this: they will be replaced by conscripts," a source close to Russia’s Federal Security Service told Istorii.

The source, who is apparently also close with the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces noted that Russia’s Ministry of Defence plans to train at least another 120,000 conscripts to replace the expected winter losses in Ukraine. 

This may explain why Putin has not yet annulled the original partial mobilization decree that he signed back in September that allowed the Kremlin to call up 300,000 Russian citizens for military service in Ukraine. 

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt as the information war is still raging. But Russia does have a population of over 140 million so the country could probably sustain another mobilization. Whether or not Putin’s regime could survive politically is another matter. What happens, a second mobilization would certainly be a very risky political gamble for a war that already seems lost.