Vladimir Putin signs decree calling up 160,000 Russians for military service

The decree says conscription applies to all citizens aged between 18 and 30 and covers the period from April to July.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the conscription of 160,000 into military service.

The decree, which was reported by news agency Interfax and also published on the government website for legal announcements, says conscription applies to all citizens aged between 18 and 30 and covers the period from April to July.

The official statement also said that "soldiers, sailors, sergeants and non-commissioned officers whose conscripted military service has expired" will be discharged from military service.

The Russian military traditionally holds conscription twice a year, once in spring and again in autumn.

The autumn conscription, which ran from October to December last year, saw 133,000 recruits sent to the army for a year of military service.

In January last year, Putin signed a law raising the maximum age for conscription from 27 to 30.

Russian media has reported that since December last year, staffing in Russia's armed forces has increased to almost 2.4 million, of which 1.5 million are military personnel.

Russian forces have slowly made territorial gains in Ukraine over the past but that has come at a cost. 

The UK's latest estimate in December, in line with Ukraine's Armed Forces General Staff figures, sits at over 768,000 Russian troops lost since the start of the war.

The statistics do not specify killed or wounded, though the overall consensus is that it includes dead, wounded, missing and captured.

November and December saw the most significant toll, with a daily high of 2,030 Russian troops lost in November — the highest since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 — according to the Ukrainian General Staff. 

At the beginning of December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine had lost 43,000 soldiers on the battlefield since the start of the war.