Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing to call up hundreds of thousands of new soldiers to fight in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, as the Kremlin tries to balance its high casualty count with public opinion turning away from the war.
Putin will mobilize between 300,000 and 500,000 people for Russia’s military at the start of October, Zelensky said in an interview with British broadcaster, Sky News.
A new wave of mobilization would be a sign of the strain nearly four and a half years of war in Ukraine has placed on Russia, and would risk stoking anger in a Russian population increasingly feeling the impact of the conflict.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.
When Putin called up 300,000 reservists in fall 2022, protests broke out across Russia and tens of thousands of people fled the country to avoid serving in the military.
Just one in four people supported the war in Ukraine continuing, according to a poll by the Russian independent pollster, the Levada Center, published in May.
The war has strained Russia’s economy, the focus on pumping out military equipment eating away at government spending in other areas closer to home for the country’s people.
Russia Not Meeting Recruiting Targets
It will not be “that difficult” for Putin to mobilize up to half a million troops, Zelensky said.
Putin “will throw poorly trained people on the battlefield,” the Ukrainian leader added. “Putin is preparing to simply send more Russians to war.”
Western officials, Ukrainian authorities and military experts say some Russian soldiers have been deployed to the front lines of fighting with little training, sometimes within days of being inducted into the military.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly predicted Russia could resort to a new wave of mobilization in the coming months, saying Moscow is falling short of its targets for new recruits while continuing to sustain an average of more than 1,000 casualties each day, according to recent estimates.
Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service has said Russia had missed its army recruitment target by roughly 30,000 people in the first three months of 2026, forcing authorities to increase sign-on bonuses for those joining up.
On Saturday, Zelensky said that roughly 221,000 people had joined the Russian military so far this year, but that Moscow had sustained 225,500 casualties in the same period.
Russia is well-known for using “meat-grinder” tactics to slowly advance in Ukraine, a term referring to when many soldiers are thrown at an enemy’s defenses to wear them down. It’s a strategy notorious for racking up high casualty counts.
Russia has suffered around 1.4 million casualties since February 2022, according to Ukrainian military and Western estimates.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine regularly publish updates on their own casualty counts, and experts say estimates of soldiers killed or wounded in wartime are often inflated or reduced for propaganda and morale reasons.
To backfill their ranks when soldiers are killed or injured, Moscow has, for the most part, relied on volunteers, convicts and foreign fighters, including roughly 12,000 North Korean soldiers.
Moscow is looking to bring an extra 30,000 North Korean troops to Russia, Zelensky said on Saturday.
First Elections Since 2022
The predicted mobilization would come shortly after Russia holds elections for hundreds of politicians to sit in the country’s Duma, the lower parliamentary house, Zelensky said.
These will be the first parliamentary elections since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Tobias Meyjes and Tony Phillips
Update 7/27/2026 at 7:20 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
