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Starting April 1, the Russian military is said to be trying to recruit 400,000 new soldiers.
Several desperate moves have already been revealed.
They include Hollywood star Steven Seagal, Internet porn and a recruitment drive among Moscow’s rat hunters.
A few weeks ago, Russia finally appeared to be on its way to taking Bakhmut, the mining town in eastern Ukraine that has been at the center of the war for the past few months in a battle described as a meat grinder.
Both Ukrainian military and British intelligence described the situation as critical as the Russian soldiers continued to arrive in wave after wave.
– They don’t care about their losses. Every meter of Ukrainian territory costs them hundreds of lives. There are many more Russians here than we have bullets to kill them with, National Guard Deputy Commander Volodymyr Nazarenko said.
Since then, the Russian advance in Bachmut seems to have lost momentum. Earlier this week, President Zelenskyi visited Ukrainian soldiers at the front, and as recently as Friday, top general Oleksandr Syrskyi said a counteroffensive may be imminent.
“The Russians are losing major forces and losing energy. Very soon we will take advantage of this opportunity,” he wrote on social media according to CNN.
Big meeting among rat hunters
At the same time, Russia is trying to recruit new soldiers for the war by what appear to be increasingly desperate means. Here are some examples revealed in just the last few days:
check Rat hunters and their friends
The employees of one of Moscow’s eleven stations for disinfection and pest control were recently called to a large meeting, reports the exiled Russian newspaper Meduza. There, the managers told how profitable it is to fight in Ukraine and promised, among other things, a lump sum of 200,000 rubles, equivalent to almost 30,000 kroner, to new recruits.
According to an attendee at the meeting, the managers said they had received directives from above to secure 100 volunteers from each of the 11 units. But at the station where the meeting was held, not even a hundred men work. Then the staff were asked to try to persuade “strangers, friends, acquaintances – whoever”, the newspaper writes.
– This will not result in anything. I don’t think a single person will say yes, says the employee who attended the meeting.
check Steven Seagal’s aikido club
American actor Steven Seagal, 70, became a Russian citizen in 2016 and is an outspoken supporter of both Putin and the war. Recently he got receive a medal from Putin’s hand and described himself as “one million percent Russian”writes Newsweek.
Last weekend, the state-controlled Russian news agency Tass released footage of aikido black belt Steven Seagal inaugurating a new martial arts center in Moscow. According to Tass is one of the aims of the club to “prepare young people to serve in the armed forces of Russia”.
Ukraine’s government was not slow to pick up the news in derisive terms.
“According to the rumors, Seagal’s running style will be included in the training. Russian soldiers will now be able to make strange hand movements when fleeing their positions,” the country’s defense ministry tweeted on Thursday.
check Ads on porn sites
The private army Wagner has been driving the offensive against Bachmut and suffered heavy losses. As Aftonbladet reported on Monday, they are now trying to recruit new soldiers through, among other things, “career talks” at high schools and advertisements on the porn site Pornhub. In the commercial, visitors are invited to “stop jerking off and join the Wagner Group”.
New promotion April 1
The partial mobilization that Vladimir Putin announced last fall is believed to have resulted in roughly 300,000 new soldiers.
Now at least as many are said to be the target of a recruitment campaign that will start on April 1. Radio Free Europe reported last week that local authorities were ordered to collect a total of 400,000 names before the turn of the year. Also Bloomberg reports on the plan and writes that the Ministry of Defense is careful that it is not about any new mobilization but about the recruitment of 400,000 “voluntary contract soldiers”.