President Vladimir Putin has agreed to a proposal to increase the size of Russia’s armed forces from 19 million to 2.4 million.
Reuters reported that he signed a decree in this regard on Thursday.
The war in Ukraine is now in its seventh month, but Moscow has not disclosed its losses beyond the first few weeks. However, Western officials and the Kiev government claim that several thousand Russian soldiers have been killed in the war.
According to the information of the decree published on the Russian official legislative portal, the implementation of the related activities will start from January 1. It aims to increase the number of fighters of the Russian Armed Forces to 1.15 million.
The last time Putin decided on the size of the Russian army was in November 2017. At that time the number of combatants in the armed forces was put at 10,10,000 and the total size of the force, including non-combatant members, was fixed at 19,000.
On February 24 of this year, the Russian military began what Moscow called a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Russia claims that the operation is being carried out to “disarm” and “free from neo-Nazis” the neighboring country.
A few weeks after the war began, Russia said 1,351 of its soldiers had been killed in Ukraine. However, they have not said anything about it since then.
Western calculations suggest that the number may be 10 times higher. And Ukraine claims that they have killed or injured at least 45,000 Russian soldiers so far.
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