Russia drafts 20,000 migrants after granting them citizenship

In Russia, 20,000 migrants who received citizenship of the aggressor country were sent to war against Ukraine after raids by security forces.

This was reported by ASTRA.

During the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, Alexander Bastrykin, Chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee, spoke about raids aimed at identifying migrants who had recently obtained Russian citizenship but had not registered for military service.

According to him, the agency has already “caught” about 80,000 such people, 20,000 of whom have been sent to the front lines in Ukraine.

Bastrykin also noted that such raids are regularly carried out with the participation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Russian Guard.

As an example, he cited a participant in Operation Truba, a native of Tajikistan who, according to him, agreed to go to war in exchange for Russian citizenship.

Conscription into the Russian Armed Forces

Recently, a website for the Unified Military Register has been launched in Russia.

Users can already log into their personal accounts, check the status of their draft notices, and obtain excerpts from the register. At the same time, the Russian authorities have not officially announced the launch of the electronic draft notice system.

It was expected that the register would start operating in the fall of 2024, but at that time it was only launched in test mode. Subsequently, the full launch was postponed to early 2025.

According to Russia’s updated legislation, a summons is considered delivered seven days after its publication in the registry. After that, the conscript is automatically banned from leaving the country.

This year, Russia announced the largest conscription in the last 14 years. The Russian Ministry of Defense plans to conscript 160,000 people — more than in any of the campaigns during the full-scale war.

For comparison: in the spring of 2022, 134,500 people were conscripted, in the fall — 120,000, in 2023, the spring conscription amounted to 147,000, the fall — 130,000, and in 2024, 150,000 conscripts were sent to the army in the spring and 133,000 in the fall.