▲ Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a meeting on social infrastructure, yesterday in Moscow, in an image distributed by the Sputnik agency.Photo Afp

Juan Pablo Duch

Correspondent

La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, October 1, 2024, p. 30

Moscow. Commemorating the second anniversary of the annexation of four regions of Ukraine – Donietsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, yesterday blamed the Western elites to turn the neighboring Slavic country into its colony, a bridgehead against Russia.

In a message recorded on the occasion of the anniversary, Putin accused the United States and its NATO allies (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) of to incite hostility towards everything Russian, to send mercenaries and advisors, to prepare the Ukrainian army for a new war and to launch, as it did in the spring and summer of 2014, a punitive operation in the southeast of that country.

For the head of the Kremlin, The evolution of events, when we see that the kyiv regime set as objectives not only Donbas (Donietsk and Lugansk), but also other regions of Russia, fully demonstrate the need and validity of the special military operation (SMO), its character genuinely liberating.

The Russian leader, after thanking his compatriots for the cohesion and patriotic spirit that they show by supporting the war campaign in Ukraine, he concluded: The truth is on our side, we will achieve all the goals set.

Coinciding with the anniversary, and more than two and a half years after intense fighting, Russia has still not managed to put the entire territory of the four annexed regions under its control nor expel the Ukrainian troops that settled in the Russian region of Kursk. On August 6, Putin ordered the Ministry of Finance meet all the needs of the army in 2025according to the text that accompanies the budget project for the next three years, which that agency delivered yesterday to the Duma (federal chamber of Deputies).

For this reason, the document, which legislators will begin to review in the first instance on October 24, instead of cutting military spending in 2025 as planned, states that it will increase again until reaching a new record in the post-Soviet history of Russia.

The Ministry of Finance allocates to the chapter National defense (logistics and weapons, salaries of officers and soldiers, as well as support for the military industry) 13.5 trillion (millions of millions) rubles, more or less the equivalent of 2 trillion 362 billion pesos or 6.3 percent of the gross domestic product .

Military spending and that allocated to National Security – which includes the Ministry of the Interior, FSB (Federal Security Service), National Guard, Committee of Instruction, Attorney General’s Office and other intelligence agencies – reaches 41 percent of the total federal budget (7.9 percent of GDP) and, again, exceeds social spending (3 percent), education (0.7 percent) and public health (0.9 percent) by 2.5 times.

But the amount that the military campaign in Ukraine will consume is not known exactly, since the secret part of the federal budget amounts to 31.5 percent, approximately the same as military spending.

Likewise, yesterday the presidential decree that seeks to incorporate 133 thousand conscripts into the Russian army, between 18 and 30 years old, called to complete mandatory military service for 12 months, was published on the legal information portal of the Russian government. The same document releases those who have already completed that period from this obligation, except for those who want to continue in the army through a contract.

The fall recruiting campaign, the second this year, begins this October 1 and concludes December 31. The spring campaign, between April 1 and July 15, affected another 150,000 Russians.

Rear Admiral Vladimir Tsiamliansky, General Director of Mobilization at the Army General Staff, promised that new conscripts will not be sent to combat zones in Ukraine.

Despite the promise, recruitment campaigns for compulsory military service always generate concern in society because many of the conscripts will be destined for the border regions of Russia, which could be attacked as happened in Kursk, or bombed as the which are in the operational range of Ukrainian drones and missiles.