Juan Pablo Duch
Correspondent
The newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday, September 17, 2024, p. 27
Moscow. Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin – for the third time since he began his term in office – special military operation In Ukraine, the presidential decree issued yesterday ordered the increase of the number of Russian soldiers and officers by 180,000.
The document states that, as of December 1, 2024, the payroll of employees assigned to the Russian army will increase to 2,389,000 people, of which 1,500,000 will be military personnel or, if preferred, there will be 180,000 more soldiers and officers, while the civilian staff remains intact.
When Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the military had 1,032,000 soldiers and officers, but in August of that year he decreed that it should have 1,150,000 troops. In December 2023 he ordered the troops to be increased by another 170,000 soldiers.
In short, in two and a half years of fighting, the Russian troops have significantly increased: 468 thousand soldiers.
To allay public concerns about the possibility of conscripts – young men without proper training who are doing compulsory military service – being sent to the war front, the Russian Defence Ministry insists that the increase in the number of troops will be carried out by people who sign a contract to join the army.
The Russian military department revealed last December that 630,000 soldiers had been contracted since February 2022, and last July it added that another 190,000 had joined so far in 2024.
Moscow – like St. Petersburg and many other cities – is covered with billboards promising attractive sums to anyone who signs up to be a professional soldier for a year, although in the Russian capital, where the standard of living is higher than in any other city in this nation, there are no long lines of interested people at the information modules installed in train stations, subway entrances, parks and other places of mass influx.
Each state in the Russian Federation, depending on its financial means, tries to attract future soldiers to Ukraine. The Moscow City Hall, for example, offers an incentive at today’s (Monday) exchange rate of 402 thousand pesos for signing a contract to join the army and the additional possibility of earning another 702 thousand pesos in the first year – adding the monthly salary and Moscow and federal subsidies.
In other words, a soldier recruited in Moscow, if he emerges unscathed from the battlefields in Ukraine, could have a monthly income of 92 thousand pesos in his first year of service.
News of the war
The week began without any major developments on the fronts where the most intense fighting is taking place, in Donbas (Donetsk and Lugansk) on the one hand, and in the Kursk region on the other.
As is often the case, the information received is contradictory and suggests that some towns are changing hands again and again, with neither side able to consolidate control there.
It is worth noting that the Russian army is still trying to encircle – it still needs to advance a strip of 5 kilometers – the Ukrainian troops defending Nevelskoye, southeast of Pokrovsk, near the city of Donetsk. For Ukrainian military analyst Konstantin Mashovets, coordinator of the Information Resistance group, the situation there is frighteningbut the Ukrainians are currently holding the Gorniak-Zhelannoye Vtoroye-Aleksandropol-Kurakhovka area, which, according to the expert, allows the military to maintain logistical supplies near Nevelskoye and to remove them from there if necessary via pontoons on the Volchia River.
The Russian Ministry of Defense yesterday claimed the release Uspenovka and Borki, 14 kilometers south-east of Sudzha, villages that had been occupied by Ukrainian troops. At the same time, the arrival of Ukrainian reinforcements from another part of the border forced the Kursk authorities to publish a list of 89 localities – 65 in the Rilsk district and 24 in the Jomutovo district – that must comply with the order of mandatory evacuation. Earlier, Governor Aleksei Smirnov had announced the evacuation of all residents within a 15-kilometer area from the border with Ukraine.
On Sunday, Russia bombed several Ukrainian cities, especially Kharkiv, and launched 56 drones at kyiv, 53 of which were shot down, according to the Ukrainian military command. A residential building in Kharkiv was hit by a missile fired from a Russian fighter-bomber, causing a fire between the 4th and 12th floors.
and reported that one woman died and 40 tenants were injured, 14 of whom required hospitalization.
Ukraine responded yesterday morning by bombing the border town of Belgorod. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Russian region, said that eight civilians were hospitalized with serious injuries. Meanwhile, the mayor of Belgorod, Valentin Demidov, said that a Ukrainian drone hit a 21-story building, damaging 27 apartments and setting 15 cars parked nearby on fire.