Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Four years after Vladimir Putin’s morning mobilization address, the same anxious phone calls are back.
The anniversary of Russia’s 2022 “partial mobilization” fell this week. Inside Russia, the mood among draft-eligible men has curdled again.
Rumors of a fresh call-up have been swirling for months, driven by leaked planning documents, Ukrainian intelligence warnings and Kremlin-adjacent reports of a second wave after the State Duma vote of September 18-20.
The independent Russian outlet Meduza, reporting from exile, used the anniversary to publish a detailed legal guide for men who fear they could be next.
Lawyers who work with draftees and reservists told Meduza they are fielding a spike in calls, and mapped out how Russians can build a paper trail before a summons arrives.
Artyom Klyga, who leads the legal department at the Conscientious Objectors Movement, and Timofey Vaskin, head of the legal department at the Conscript School, recommended assembling what they call a “safety folder”: notarized copies of a passport and military registration papers, a power of attorney, medical records establishing any ineligibility, deferment paperwork and printed templates for formal complaints.
They also urged men to carry a charged smartphone alongside a spare basic phone at all times, because cameras and internet-enabled devices are barred inside military units. A power bank, a pen and blank paper for on-the-spot appeals round out the recommended kit.
Calls to Russian state hotlines, the lawyers stressed, are automatically recorded. That turns each complaint into an official record that can later be used to document rights violations.
What is fueling the panic
The renewed fear has a clear political calendar. Novaya Gazeta Europe reported in late June, citing sources close to the Presidential Administration, a recruitment official and a source inside the ruling United Russia party, that the Kremlin was weighing a fresh call-up for October, once the State Duma vote was out of the way.
Voluntary contract enlistment fell by more than a third in the spring of 2026 compared with a year earlier, the outlet reported. One recruitment source described “constant complaints from the front about the severe shortage of people.”
As reported by the Kyiv Post, citing Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Office of the President, Russia intended to mobilize 600,000 more men across 2026 and 2027, split evenly between the two years, the outlet wrote in late August. Kyiv put Russian personnel losses from January through July at around 240,000, of whom at least 140,000 were irrecoverable.
Putin says “complete nonsense”
Putin himself has dismissed the speculation. Speaking to reporters on September 2, he called the reports of a new call-up “complete nonsense” and framed them as “an information attack on Russia,” The Moscow Times reported.
Days before the September 21, 2022 announcement, Putin had also denied any mobilization plans. The 2022 decree sent 300,000 reservists to the front and pushed hundreds of thousands of other men into exile.
A draft that never legally ended
Analysts point out that the 2022 decree was never formally rescinded, meaning authorities can resume issuing draft notices without a fresh announcement. Meduza noted in a separate analysis this month that Russia has quietly built the infrastructure for a call-up without needing to call it one:
A digital draft register with automatic travel bans for anyone summoned, year-round processing, and legal cover for deploying reservists to “critical infrastructure” without a formal mobilization.
Economist Janis Kluge estimated in that piece that the second-quarter influx of new recruits was running at around a thousand men a day, in principle enough to sustain current operations.
The Defense Ministry, though, sees contract soldiers as too thin a base for the specialized drone and technical units that dominate the front, and a formal mobilization of 300,000 would run to more than a trillion rubles a year.
Novaya Gazeta Europe’s Kremlin-adjacent sources placed the earliest possible announcement window in October, once the newly seated State Duma is in place.
