Is Russia About to Mobilize Again? – Novinite.com
The question has a date attached to it, which is why it has become urgent rather than merely recurrent. Russia holds State Duma elections on September 18 to 20, and virtually every forecast that Vladimir Putin will order a new call-up places it immediately after that vote.
The most detailed claim comes from Kyiv. On August 27, the Office of the President of Ukraine released a briefing from the Defense Intelligence Directorate and the Foreign Intelligence Service stating that the Russian General Staff has already prepared a scenario for mobilizing an additional 600,000 people across 2026 and 2027, split evenly at 300,000 a year. According to that assessment, the intake would be used first to bring existing formations fighting in Ukraine up to full strength and to man units currently being formed. Oleg Ivashchenko, who heads Ukraine‘s military intelligence, has been careful in how he frames it, telling Ukrinform that there is as yet no indication any mobilization has been announced and that what intelligence is describing are plans under consideration rather than decisions taken.
The arithmetic underpinning the claim is the part that does not depend on trusting Ukrainian intelligence, because both sides publish figures pointing the same direction. Kyiv puts Russian personnel losses between January and July 2026 at roughly 240,000, of whom at least 140,000 are permanently out of the war, against 232,000 recruited on contract over the same months. Volodymyr Zelensky offered slightly different numbers in late July, some 225,500 killed or wounded during 2026 against approximately 221,000 recruited. Whichever set is closer, the pattern is a force consuming men marginally faster than it can sign them, in a war where the manpower requirement has not fallen.
Contract recruitment also appears to be weakening rather than holding. The exiled outlets Vyorstka and IStories have reported that recruitment in Moscow and across Russia has fallen by roughly a third this year compared with 2025, and Russian regions have been raising sign-up payments to compensate. If that trend continues, the contract system that has allowed the Kremlin to avoid a second mobilization since 2022 stops covering the gap on its own.
Several preparatory signals sit alongside the numbers. Ukrainian intelligence reports that by the end of July more than 2,500 new vacancies had been posted on Russian employment platforms for positions in the military registration and mobilization departments that companies are required to maintain, which is the kind of administrative expansion that precedes a call-up rather than accompanies it. Russia has been amending legislation to tighten military registration requirements and widening the categories of convicts eligible to serve, reportedly to include people sentenced for trafficking weapons, explosives, radioactive materials and drugs, as well as banditry and organizing illegal migration. A separate report that the military had canceled deferments for fathers of three or more children was denied by a senior Russian lawmaker in late August.
Moscow’s public position is flat denial. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RTVI on August 25 that the reports are fabrications deliberately placed in the news cycle, using his customary term “information ducks,” and attributed them to Ukrainian authorities attempting to destabilize Russia ideologically. Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council, called the rumors nonsense and a Ukrainian lying provocation, arguing that roughly 200,000 contract signings in the first half of 2026 make additional mobilization unnecessary.
Those denials carry less weight than they otherwise might for a specific and well-documented reason. Peskov dismissed mobilization rumors in almost identical language in September 2022, days before Putin announced the partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists, Russia‘s first since the Second World War. That precedent does not prove a new call-up is coming, but it does establish that a Kremlin denial is not evidence of anything.
The case against is nonetheless real. The 2022 mobilization was the single most politically costly decision of the war for the Russian leadership, producing rare public protests and driving tens of thousands of men out of the country, and Putin has spent four years constructing an expensive contract system precisely to avoid repeating it. Medvedev’s figure, whatever its accuracy, reflects a genuine institutional preference for paying volunteers over conscripting the unwilling.
Independent assessment lands roughly in the middle. The Delphi Global Research Center titled its July analysis “Russian Mobilization in 2026: The Odds Are Even,” identifying battlefield setbacks, manpower strain and conditions resembling those preceding September 2022 as factors raising the risk, while noting that a large-scale mobilization after the elections remains speculative even though Russian sources and international media are actively discussing it. Delphi also raises a use for additional manpower beyond Ukraine, pointing to plans for expanding ground formations in the Leningrad Military District and around Kaliningrad, expansions European intelligence services believe have so far occurred largely on paper because manpower keeps being diverted south. Finland’s army chief said in June that Russia could eventually deploy 80,000 troops near the Finnish border, against roughly 20,000 before 2022.
The Duma vote concludes on September 20. If the assessments are right, any announcement follows rather than precedes it, and the administrative signals, the recruitment vacancies, the registration rules and the deferment categories, will move before any decree does.