Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he expects a mobilisation of army reservists he ordered to bolster his country's troops in Ukraine to reach the targeted number of recruits in two weeks, a milestone that would allow him to end the hugely unpopular call-up.
Putin told reporters after attending a summit in Kazakhstan that 222,000 of the 300,000 reservists the Russian Defence Ministry set as a goal have been mobilised.
A total of 33,000 of them are already in military units and 16,000 are involved in combat, he said.
The call-up, announced by Putin in September as his forces lost occupied ground to a Ukrainian counteroffensive, has aroused public discontent in Russia, where almost all men under the age of 65 are registered as reservists.
At the same time, Russian nationalists have criticised the Kremlin's handling of the war, increasing pressure on Putin to do more to turn the tide in Russia's favour.
Despite Putin and other top officials stating the mobilisation would affect some 300,000 people, the decree the president signed to get the draft going did not mention a specific number.
Russian media reports have suggested the actual number could be as high as 1.2 million reservists.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has implied that a classified clause of the decree contained the number of people the authorities intend to be mobilised, among other details.
Putin initially described the mobilisation as “partial” and said only those with combat or service experience would be drafted.
However, Russian media reports have described attempts to round up men without the relevant experience or who were ineligible for service for medical reasons.
In the wake of Putin's order, tens of thousands of men left Russia. Reports have surfaced since then of recruits getting deployed to the front lines in Ukraine with little training and inadequate equipment.
Several mobilised reservists were reported to have died in combat in Ukraine this week, several days after they were drafted.
Putin said all activated recruits should receive adequate training and that he would assign Russia's Security Council “to conduct an inspection of how mobilised citizens are being trained.”
Putin also said Friday there was no need for more widespread attacks against Ukraine, such as those Russia launched Monday in retaliation for an Oct. 8 truck bomb explosion on a prized bridge linking Russia to Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The Kerch Bridge explosion followed Ukraine's recapturing of occupied areas in the country's east and south in continuing counteroffensives that have restored Ukrainian confidence and embarrassed Russia's military.
Russia has promised free accommodation to residents of Ukraine's partially occupied Kherson region who want to evacuate to Russia, a sign that Ukrainian military gains along the war's southern front are worrying the Kremlin.
The Moscow-installed leader of Kherson, one of four regions illegally annexed by Putin last month, asked the Kremlin to organise an evacuation from four cities, citing incessant shelling by Ukrainian forces.
Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Moscow-appointed regional administration, said a decision was made to evacuate Kherson residents to the Russian regions of Rostov, Krasnodar and Stavropol, as well as to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
"We, residents of the Kherson region, of course know that Russia doesn't abandon their own, and Russia always offers a hand,” Saldo said on Thursday.