Kremlin may plan to annex occupied territories of Ukraine before Oct 1 in order to forcibly conscript Ukrainian citizens into its army – ISW

The planned annexation of the occupied territories of Ukraine by the Russian authorities may occur before or shortly after October 1, the beginning of the usual autumn draft in Russia, in order to ensure the forced conscription of Ukrainian civilians to fight against Ukraine, according to a report by analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

“The Kremlin will likely order the Russian Ministry of Defense to include Ukrainian civilians in occupied and newly annexed Ukrainian territory in the Russian conscription cycle, broadening the forced mobilization of Ukrainian civilians to fight against Ukraine,” the analysts said.

The ISW also notes that one motivation for Putin to order mobilization and annexation in concert with one another is to broaden the forced mobilization of Ukrainian civilians, but those civilians do not meet the legal criteria for the Kremlin’s current partial mobilization order—almost none of them in the mobilizable age categories are likely to have experience in the Russian military. As “Russian” citizens under Russian law, however, all Ukrainian men between 18 and 27 years old in annexed territories would become eligible for conscription.

At the same time, the Russian authorities are trying to cope with the public discontent that has arisen around the mobilization in the Russian Federation itself, but the ISW believes that the Kremlin narratives are unlikely to calm the Russians.

“The Kremlin is deflecting blame for the Russian government’s failure to abide by its own stated criteria for mobilization and exemptions onto the failing bureaucratic institutions responsible for the mobilization. The Kremlin is downplaying the widespread violations of the mobilization law as individual errors of local authorities, claiming to correct these errors as citizens call attention to them. The violations are clearly too common to be merely the result of individual errors, however, and Russian citizens can see them all too clearly. Unlike Russian failures in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has been able to minimize or deflect because its citizens cannot see them directly, violations of the mobilization decree are evident to many Russians,” the analysts stress.

The Kremlin has most likely set quotas for local officials to fill and emphasized meeting those quotas over abiding by the legal guidelines for mobilization eligibility, leading to the prioritization of numbers over adherence to the law and thus to the forced mobilization of men with no military experience or with other disqualifying health conditions. Attempts to reduce public tension by punishing bureaucratic institutions for widespread "mistakes" in the mobilization campaign, and at the same time to force the mobilization bureaucracy to fulfill the quotas set to support military operations, are most likely mutually exclusive, according to the ISW.

“The Kremlin also risks further undermining this critical bureaucratic institution during an important period by continuously blaming it for failures that are likely not entirely of its making,” the report says.

At the same time, analysts are convinced that even a well-conducted call-up of Russian reserves is unlikely to create significant combat power in the near future. Financially motivated reforms of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which reduced the service life of conscripts from two years to one in 2008, mean that those who were drafted since 2008 were not trained to a level of competence that would make them useful for strengthening the Russian army without significant additional training.

At the same time, the Russian authorities may be considering officially closing the borders or more formally restricting the movement of men of combat-ready age inside the country in order to better conduct partial mobilization.