A total of 318 thousand individuals have been mobilised in Russia, 49 thousand are “already carrying out combat tasks,” Vladimir Putin said as he spoke to representatives of youth volunteer organisations in Moscow.
He also noted that the number of mobilised individuals surpassed the promised 300 thousand since “the flow of people volunteering to go to the frontline did not stop after the end of partial mobilisation had been announced.”
During the conversation, Putin also spoke about how different people who came from Ukraine to Russia and Europe are. “Feel the difference between those people who came from Ukraine here, to Russia, and those who are in Europe. In Europe they go to restaurants and demand discounts for themselves, and here people ask for work,” he said.
Putin also said that Mariupol is “an ancient Russian city” and called on the residents of Kherson to evacuate.
Out of the 300,000 people drafted under the “partial mobilisation” 87,000 have already been “sent to the operations areas where the special military operation is conducted”, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on 1 November.
Vladimir Putin consulted with lawyers earlier in regards to the presidential decree on the end of mobilisation in the country and found out there was no need for such a document, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed on 1 November. The Kremlin also promised that there would be no new wave of mobilisation upon the old presidential decree.
As Pavel Chikov of Agora, a human rights group, stressed out earlier, “the law and the mobilisation decree only regulate the declaration of mobilisation, but its suspension or termination is not subject to any regulatory act.” Chikov believes that an official decree on end of mobilisation will keep the authorities from additional mobilisation efforts without a new decree.
Shoigu reported to Putin on the end of mobilisation in Russia on 28 October.
