According to Ukraine’s Military Intelligence, Russia has forcefully mobilized around 60,000 soldiers in Ukraine’s occupied territory.
Since the beginning of 2022, Russians have forcefully mobilized 55,000 to 60,000 men into its army in Ukraine’s seized territory, according to Military Intelligence official Andriy Cherniak in a discussion for Radio Liberty’s Donbas Realities program.
Russia forcibly mobilized 60,000 troops in Ukraine’s seized territory – Intelligence
According to the official, Russian invaders apprehended people on the streets and forcibly removed them from companies where they worked. Chernyak went on to say that Russians recruit people from freshly captured territories as well as parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which Moscow has controlled as proxy “republics” since 2015.
In a nutshell, Russia is forcing men from Ukrainian territories conquered during the hybrid war that began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to fight in a full-scale war against Ukraine.
Let’s take another glance at this data, not only in terms of violations of the rules and customs of war (in which Russia has acquired a long list of crimes) but also in Russia’s constant strategy of exploiting the resources of colonized territories to sustain its aggressive wars against next victims. In addition, numerical comparisons between NATO and the EU are made.
Let us first compare these data to those of NATO members. The total number of troops in various European countries’ armies is 60,000. It is three times bigger than the Hungarian army. It is twice as large as the armies of Bulgaria and the Czech Republic and nearly as large as Canada’s army.
In this context, we should also consider the known facts about Russia’s exploitation of ethnic minorities from faraway areas to enlist in the war with Ukraine. In its conflicts, Moscow exploits the people it conquered decades or centuries ago.
Russia could enlist Ukrainians for its fight against the West
Following this logic, if the Russians were able to take over Ukraine in a matter of weeks, as the Putin administration intended, they would almost certainly begin mobilizing Ukrainians for a war against NATO. Invaders from Russia might mobilize hundreds of thousands if not millions, of Ukrainians as they enlist Crimean locals for the fight against Ukraine.
This case demonstrates why Ukraine is now protecting not just its territorial integrity but also Europe’s security. As a result, NATO’s military assistance to Ukraine contributes to the free world’s battle against tyranny, which brings war and disaster.
Supporting Ukraine also contributes to the security, peace, and stability of European countries, particularly those in Eastern and Central Europe.
Forced mobilization to the Russian army in occupied Ukrainian territories
According to Ukrainian intelligence, Russia is also pushing students from captured Ukrainian territory to join its invasion force.
“This is a forced mobilization: the invaders apprehended people on the street, went to the few businesses that were still open, and forcibly removed people – they simply changed their clothes and sent them to the front. They promised you’d be on the second or third line, but you ended up on the front line,” said Andriy Cherniak.
“A person went to class in the morning and was fighting two days later.” Because Russia does not regard the population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as human beings, the invaders are unconcerned, and the laws do not apply. The only real chance [of survival] is to surrender at the first opportunity,” Andriy Chernyak explained.
Ethnic minorities are being utilized as cannon fodder by the Russian invading army, according to reports.
Let us return to the Kremlin’s current conflict with Ukraine. The ISW and other foreign analysts have observed the prevalence of non-ethnic Russian battalions in Ukraine, including forces from Chechnya, South Ossetia, Tuva, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and others.
According to the ISW, Putin is attempting to shift the burden of the war in Ukraine onto ethnic minorities from the poorest areas and avoid unrest in wealthier regions.
Moscow’s invading army is losing more and more troops in its war with Ukraine. While the Kremlin dictatorship is afraid to launch a full-scale military mobilization of men officially, Putin’s regime is attempting to compensate for these horrific losses with the covert enlisting of ethnic minorities in poor regions.
Given the severe lack of “cannon fodder” for the war, a covert partial mobilization was carried out rather than a full-scale mobilization, which is highly disfavored in Russia. To begin, the army recruits troops from remote, underdeveloped regions populated by ethnic minorities, mainly the Far East, North Caucasus, Buryatia, Khakassia, and Yakutia. The military draft is lesser in economically and socially developed Russian cities where ethnic Russians make up the majority of the population.
According to the independent Russian media outlet MediaZona (English version by the media Meduza), which examined accounts of Russians killed in its colonial war against Ukraine, Dagestan and Buryatia, two of Russia’s poorest regions, they sustained the highest casualties. Meanwhile, citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg (home to more than 12% of Russia’s total population) are nearly absent from death data.
Use of colonized people for new wars
Russia’s 300-year imperial history has been one of expansion, beginning with Tsar Peter’s proclamation of the Moscow Kingdom as the Russian Empire in 1721. It was followed by massive repression, violent conflicts, and extermination against hundreds of indigenous peoples who came into contact with the warring empire.
Today’s Russia, in the form of the Putin regime, maintains the imperial strategy of conquest and genocide of peoples as an inherited state and successor of the Russian Tsarist Empire and the totalitarian USSR (dubbed the “prison of nations”).
Moscow’s ongoing cruel assault targets independent Ukraine, and it employs indigenous residents from remote parts of Russia as cannon fodder. At the same time, the Kremlin targets the West, Europe and the entire free world with its hybrid war, propaganda and disinformation.
From this perspective, it is critical that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with the military assistance of Western allies, defeat Moscow’s troops in its colonial war, thereby halting the Kremlin’s ongoing expansion plans that go far beyond Ukrainian borders.
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