WP: CIA, “Moscow wants to recruit 400,000 men but without mobilization”
Russian officials are busy trying to recruit hundreds of thousands of men for the war in Ukraine while avoiding a new, surely unpopular, mobilisation. But at the same time there is growing concern about the lack of civilian workforce. This is what we read in confidential documents of the CIA, part of the online leak, of which the young member of the National Guard Jack Teixeira is accused.
According to one of the documents, writes the Washington Post, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved in mid-February the military’s proposal to quietly recruit 400,000 more men over the course of 2023. To shelter Putin and the Kremlin from popular discontent, we read in another document, the plan requires regional governors to organize recruitment campaigns and continue to draw on prisons. The goal is to recruit 415,000 men, “300,000 of whom will go to the reserve and 115,000 to form new units or reinforce others”, notes the intelligence, based on the estimate of a deficit “of 50,000 fighters and 40,000 reservists” in the Russian forces in Ukraine .
But some economic officials oppose this strategy because it would aggravate the shortage of workforce, the most serious in the last 20 years, due to the war and the flight abroad of many skilled workers. Alarms in this sense have come from the Russian Central Bank and the Gaidar economic policy institute.
To know more: Top secret documents, the Pentagon “mole” risks up to 20 years in prison