In July, the Russian military conducted exercises in the Kaliningrad region to practice procedures for a possible mobilization of residents, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Western intelligence officials. According to them, officers from St. Petersburg arrived to run the drills, working out how to house, feed, and arm people in the event of a call-up.
The WSJ sources said similar exercises are taking place across Russia, though they did not specify locations. The sources stressed that the Kremlin has not yet decided on a new mobilization, and that the decision has been postponed until parliamentary elections in late September.
American and European officials say that in recent months Russian authorities have failed to recruit enough contract soldiers to replace frontline losses. In their view, Vladimir Putin's desire to capture the entire Donbas territory could force the Kremlin to consider a new mobilization. If that happens, authorities might carry it out gradually, summoning small groups of men to military enlistment offices, which experts say would help avoid the panic that followed the September 2022 mobilization announcement.
On Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia is "planning that this will be a peripheral mobilization." "Their goal today is 300,000 additional for 2026, plus more for 2027," he said.
Earlier, the partisan group Atesh reported that special commissions are inspecting the Kadamovsky training ground in the Rostov region and Alabino in the Moscow region to assess the possibility of housing large numbers of people there. An analyst at Conflict Intelligence Team told Novaya Gazeta Europe that the project has no information about such preparation of training grounds and has seen no objective evidence of it. There is no independent confirmation of this information.
Russian authorities have not commented on inspections at training grounds. Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said on August 20 that, as far as he knows, a mass mobilization is not planned.
Earlier it became known that authorities decided to introduce fines of up to 1 million rubles for failure to comply with mobilization decisions by regional operational headquarters or regional heads. The corresponding bill was submitted to the Duma.
According to The Moscow Times, rumors of a new mobilization have already increased Russians' anxiety: queues have again begun to form at the land border with Georgia. The Russian customs service said that in mid-August, more than 20,000 people per day crossed the Verkhny Lars checkpoint.