announced in September was complete.

Speaking at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin

broadcast on state television, Shoigu told Putin: “The task set by you of (mobilising) 300,000 people has been completed. No further measures are planned.”

Shoigu said that of the 300,000 mobilised recruits, 218,000 remained in training, while 82,000 had been deployed to the conflict zone, of which 41,000 had been assigned to their units.

He said that in future, recruitment for the Ukraine campaign would be based on volunteers and professional soldiers, rather than mobilising more of Russia’s several million reservists.

Putin declared a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists on Sept. 21, after a series of military defeats saw Russian forces routed from east Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and under increasing pressure in the southern Kherson region.

The move touched off an exodus of military-age men from Russia, with tens of thousands heading for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan, which allow Russians to enter without visas.

Over 2,000 people arrested at anti-mobilisation protests across Russia. There was public outcry over cases of men being mobilised despite medical exemptions, or a lack of military experience.

Responding to Shoigu, Putin

acknowledged problems with mobilisation, saying that they were “inevitable”, and said that it was necessary to make “corrections” to the development of Russia’s armed forces.

MOSCOW, Oct 28 (Reuters) – Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday said that the “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine that Russia announced in September was complete, with tens of thousands of them already sent to the combat zone.

Speaking at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin broadcast on state television, Shoigu said: “The task set by you of (mobilising) 300,000 people has been completed. No further measures are planned.”

Shoigu said that of the 300,000 mobilised reservists, 218,000 remained in training, while 82,000 had been deployed to the conflict zone, of which 41,000 were on active service with their units.

“I want to thank them for their dedication to duty, for their patriotism, for their firm determination to defend our country, to defend Russia, their homes, their families, our citizens and our people,” Putin said.

In future, Shoigu said, recruitment for the Ukraine campaign would be based on volunteers and professional soldiers, rather than mobilising more of Russia’s several million reservists.

Putin declared a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists on Sept. 21, after a series of military defeats saw Russian forces routed from east Ukraine’s Kharkiv region and under increasing pressure in the southern Kherson region.

The move touched off an exodus of military age men from Russia, with tens of thousands heading for countries including Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan, which allow Russians to enter without visas.

Over 2,000 people arrested at anti-mobilisation protests across Russia. There was public outcry over cases of men being mobilised despite medical exemptions, or a lack of military experience.

Responding to Shoigu, Putin acknowledged problems with mobilisation, saying that they were “inevitable”, and said that the Ukrainian campaign had shown the need for “corrections” to Russia’s armed forces.

Putin said: “Based on the experience of conducting the special military operation, we need to think over and make corrections to the way all components of the armed forces, including the ground forces, are constructed.”

Russia’s armed forces have struggled in the eight months since Putin ordered tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, in what Moscow calls the “special military operation”.

Russian armed forces abandoned an attempt to seize Kyiv and other northern Ukrainian cities in April, before losing ground in the south and east to Ukrainian counter-attacks since August.

Reporting by Reuters; editing by John Stonestreet/Guy Faulconbridge

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Spotted

14:30

by Aris Roussinos

Credit: Getty

As the seasons change, the war in Ukraine has entered a new phase. Following a series of major reverses the Russians are digging in, in the hope that the autumn rains will bog down any further Ukrainian counter-offensives, perhaps allowing time to train and equip their newly-mobilised conscript army for a second push next spring.

In the meantime, Russia’s attention has shifted towards knocking out Ukraine’s electrical grid from the air. Over the past three weeks, waves of cruise missile and Iranian Shahed drone strikes have battered Ukraine’s power infrastructure, damaging or destroying around 40% of its power network, leading to blackouts and outages across the country, including western cities hitherto barely affected by the war. In his nightly address last night from a blacked-out Kyiv, standing next to a downed Shahed UAV, Zelensky asserted: “We are not afraid of the dark. The darkest times for us are not without light, but without freedom.” 

But if the disruption of power supplies continues into winter, it will affect civilian morale, as is no doubt intended. Urging Ukrainians to limit their electricity consumption on Wednesday, Zelensky stated that “Russian terrorists have created such difficult conditions for our energy workers that no one in Europe has ever seen or encountered” but “we need victory over Russia in the energy sphere as well.”

The coinciding of the new bombing campaign with the appointment of the Russian Air Force general Sergey Surovikin, who oversaw much of the brutal and successful aerial bombardment of rebel-held Syrian cities following Russia’s 2015 intervention, has naturally led to speculation that his appointment is an attempt to apply the “Syrian playbook” to Ukraine.

Yet expert analysts urge caution: as the Institute for the Study of War observed, all the Russian commanders overseeing the Ukraine war so far have previously commanded operations in Syria, using much the same methods. In any case:

If anything, the surprise is that Russia did not pursue this aerial campaign at the beginning of the war. A “shock and awe” campaign against civilian and dual-use infrastructure, like American bombing of Iraq’s power nodes in 2003, would ordinarily precede a ground offensive. Perhaps the better analogy is with the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, in which the destruction of the electric grid only began after three months of limited success striking military targets. 

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea briefed then that “the fact that lights went out across 70% of the country shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now… We can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want.” No doubt Putin, who frequently cites NATO’s Kosovo intervention as a precedent, is aiming to send a similar message. But the takeaway lesson is surely that Russia has dialled back its war aims, even as the conflict’s hardships affect a broader swathe of Ukraine’s civilian population.

Back in February, Putin ordered lightly-armed troops to invade much of Ukraine, leaving the country’s infrastructure intact in the seeming belief the war would end in days with a puppet government installed. In destroying Ukraine’s power grid, Putin is signalling, perhaps unintentionally, acceptance that his broadest ambitions will not be realised. Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure is now a target precisely because the country will not become part of Russia’s sphere of influence. The escalation of the bombing is in its own way a quiet admission of defeat.