Ukrainian intelligence chief: Russia conducts covert mobilization

Russia is conducting covert mobilization and starts using old equipment from storage, which can only conditionally be called combat.

According to Liga.net, Kirill Budanov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (MID) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, said this on the air of the national telethon.

“Russia is conducting covert mobilization. She goes two ways. The first is the actual actions, which are called covert mobilization. The second is the use of reservists. They call it BARS - the combat army reserve of the country. That is, in fact, it is reservists who are attracted on short-term contracts to carry out military operations,” he said.

According to Budanov, these facts are absolutely confirmed - Ukraine has POWs who were involved in this system.

He also gave two reasons why Russia does not announce mobilization publicly. The first is economic, mobilization will hit the Russian economy even more in the face of sanctions. The second is that Russia will not be able to explain why mobilization is needed if Russian officials claim that everything is “going according to plan” for the Russian army.

“Since they don’t have answers to these two questions, they are doing it in an exclusively covert way,” the head of the MID said.

The head of the Main Intelligence Directorate also noted that Russia is considering changes to the legislation so that the conscription is not twice a year, but at any time when necessary. The issue of increasing responsibility for evaders is also being considered. “People are trying en masse to avoid going to war in Ukraine,” he explained.

In addition, Budanov confirmed that Russia has a significant shortage of military equipment, it will reopen equipment from warehouses that have been standing there since the 1960-80s. According to him, after such a long storage, this equipment "can only conditionally be called combat."

As an example, he cited a case of the 810th Marine Brigade in the temporarily occupied Crimea, in which only 14% of equipment went to the training ground, although on paper there was a staffing of 100%.