Employees at military enlistment offices are doing the same, according to Bloomberg, which cited documents it said it had obtained. The agency provided no further details.
Earlier this year, Vladimir Putin ordered a 15% cut in regional officials to ease the burden on a deficit-strained budget. Some fear the Kremlin could mobilize the people who lose those jobs, the documents obtained by Bloomberg indicate.
A source described as an official in European security structures told the agency that Russia is preparing to send an additional 300,000 people to the war. Unlike September 2022, when hundreds of thousands of Russians left the country, there may be no formal mobilization announcement at all.
Russia has reorganized the work of its military enlistment offices so they can handle an influx of conscripts, the Bloomberg source said: instead of paper summonses, they can send electronic ones while simultaneously barring travel abroad. The Defense Ministry has gained access to a broad database on citizens: a unified military registration register is now linked to tax service data, Interior Ministry databases, medical histories, property records and border control databases.
Putin has not yet made a final decision on whether to hold a mobilization, according to the Bloomberg source. But the army fighting in Ukraine needs new troops, and the president still expects it to capture the whole of Donbas.
Russia's battlefield losses now reach 1,000 killed each week, a Moscow source familiar with the statistics told Bloomberg. The army needs more soldiers, while the quality of those signing contracts with the Defense Ministry is currently extremely low, the source said.
To keep the size of its force on the Ukrainian front stable — a force Putin himself has estimated at 700,000 soldiers — Russia needs to attract about 400,000 people a year. And although the average bonus for signing a contract has reached a record 1.8 million rubles, the flow of new recruits is shrinking: 234,000 in the first half of the year, against 260,000 a year earlier, according to calculations by Janis Kluge, an expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Territorial gains in Ukraine have also all but ground to a halt: the summer offensive brought only 155 sq km under Russian control — 13 times less than in the same period a year earlier (2,037 sq km), according to Bloomberg analyst Alex Kokcharov.
The military situation in recent months indicates Russia does not have enough manpower to concentrate troops on the main axis of attack and reliably cover the front line, said Kirill Rogov, head of Re: Russia. In his words, mobilization is necessary if the goal is to reach the borders of Donbas within the next six months.
The Kremlin will likely focus its mobilization efforts on the regions that show the greatest support for Putin during the Duma elections, said political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann. In her words, more people will be called up in places that demonstrate loyalty, discipline and administrative efficiency.
Reports that Russia could again declare mobilization after the State Duma elections have been appearing for several weeks. They have come in particular from Meduza's sources and Western media, and Ukrainian authorities say so regularly. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claims Russian authorities allegedly plan to mobilize up to 300,000 people in the fall.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Ukrainian authorities are trying to ideologically destabilize the situation in Russia with their statements about a possible mobilization. Commenting on rumors of mobilization, Vladimir Putin said there is no scenario today that would require it. He called such reports "nonsense" and an information attack on Russia.