Vladimir Putin has announced that an order he made earlier this year to increase the size of Russia’s standing army to improve combat capability has been successfully carried out, state-owned news agency TASS reported on Monday.
Speaking at a Defence Ministry meeting in Moscow, Putin announced the creation of the new Leningrad and Moscow military districts, as well as various new units and formations, and confirmed that the Russian Armed Forces now numbered some 1.5 million servicemen.
The announcement, which Putin attributed to “over 1,000 men and women signing up to join the army on a daily basis”, followed his order to raise the number of Russian troops to 1.5 million in September.
Russia’s newest weapon, the Oreshnik medium-range missile system, which was used against Ukraine in November in response to strikes on Russia with the use of Western weapons, would go into mass production in the near future, Putin said.
Putin stressed that Russia was not at war with the Ukrainian people but with what he called the “neo-Nazi Kyiv regime”, which he said had seized power in a “bloody anti-constitutional coup in 2014", TASS continued.
At the same meeting, Russian Defence Minister Andrey Belousov said the army should be prepared for a potential military conflict with NATO “within the next decade”, according to independent news outlet Meduza.
Belousov said such a conflict was a possibility due to decisions taken at a NATO summit in Washington in July, at which Russia was identified as the “most significant and direct threat to allies’ security” in the long-term.