Putin plans to conscript 160,000 more Russians for war with Ukraine

Russia drafts men aged 18 to 30 years old. The new order, starting April 1 and to be completed by July 15, comes amid the ongoing negotiations for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, brokered by the United States, News.Az reports citing Politico.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims Russia is dragging out the peace process as it is preparing a massive new offensive to grab more Ukrainian land before actual peace talks.

“According to our intelligence, Russia is preparing for new offensives in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia regions,” Zelenskyy said last week.

“They are dragging out negotiations and trying to drag the U.S. into endless, meaningless discussions about fake conditions to buy time and then try to seize even more land. Putin wants to negotiate territory from a stronger position. He only thinks about war. So, our job — all of us — is defense in the broadest sense of the word,” he added.

Yet U.S. President Donald Trump, who on Sunday said he was “pissed off” by Putin’s desire to remove Zelenskyy from power for a peace treaty to become possible, still believes the Kremlin’s leader will stick to his word and that he wants the war to end.

Some conscripts will also be dismissed from the military, having served their terms. Independent Russian journalists managed to verify the names of over 100,000 Russian soldiers who have been killed since Putin invaded Ukraine, though Kyiv claims overall Russian losses are getting close to a million dead and wounded as of March.

Ukraine has lost more than 46,000 troops and over 380,000 have been wounded, Zelenskyy said in February. In March, Kyiv managed to improve the survival rate of Ukrainian soldiers, Ukrainian Army Chief Commander General Oleksandr Syrskyi said in a statement on Monday.

“We have modernized [the] basic military training course and increased its duration to 1.5 months, and also introduced a mandatory adaptive period for new recruits to combat brigades. And this is giving positive results — this month we recorded a decrease in losses compared to the previous ones,” Syrskyi said.

Putin, though, thinks his troops “will finish” the Ukrainian army, as the Kremlin leader said last week.