Conscripts will start departing for their places of service from October 10, Colonel General Yevgeny Burdinsky, head of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the Russian General Staff, said in an interview with the Defense Ministry's newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. He said conscripts would not be sent "to carry out the tasks of the special military operation" in the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics, the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, or on the territory of Ukraine.
More than 140,000 people were sent to compulsory service during the spring conscription campaign, which ran from April to July. Since 2026, Russia has operated a year-round conscription system: men are called up throughout the year, but are dispatched to their places of service in the spring and autumn.
Artyom Klyga, head of the legal department at the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, told TV Rain that a full-scale mobilization on the 2022 model is unlikely. At the same time, he said, cases continue to be recorded in which men are detained in the regions and forcibly taken to military enlistment offices, after which their relatives learn that contracts have been signed.
According to Klyga, human rights advocates describe this as recruitment. It affects vulnerable categories of citizens who have debts or criminal records. Drug-related cases are frequently recorded and used as a lever of pressure. Klyga said that in half of the cases everything ends with psychological pressure, while in the other half people resist and face violence.
The lawyer noted that it is extremely difficult to appeal a formally concluded contract: over the entire period, human rights advocates know of two or three positive rulings. With the 2022 mobilization, he said, there were more won cases.
Klyga suggested that Vladimir Putin's decrees on increasing the size of the armed forces imply a growth in the number of staff positions at the expense of contract soldiers. According to him, not only state structures are involved in the recruitment system: private legal entities and individual entrepreneurs are appearing in it, receiving money for bringing people into military service.
For conscripts who receive an electronic summons, Klyga advises proceeding from the assumption that the enlistment office considers it properly served and will likely try to bar them from leaving the country. If there is no time to report, he recommends obtaining a certificate of incapacity for work in order to secure a deferral, and using that time to assess whether there are illnesses or injuries that could serve as grounds for exemption.
According to Klyga, raids on conscripts in Moscow usually begin around the 15th of the month.