{"id":267206,"date":"2023-04-04T07:17:28","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T07:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=267206"},"modified":"2023-04-06T06:49:41","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T06:49:41","slug":"russia-announces-military-expansion-to-1-5-million-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=267206","title":{"rendered":"Russia Announces Military Expansion to 1.5 Million Troops"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Inder Singh Bisht \u2013 Defense News Jan 18, 2023<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>Russia will expand its armed forces to 1.5 million personnel, defense minister <strong>Sergey Shoigu<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/eng.mil.ru\/en\/news_page\/country\/more.htm?id=12451669@egNews\">announced<\/a> at a meeting on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>The expansion will be carried out from 2023 to 2026, including infrastructure, armament build-up, and structural reorganization.<\/p>\n<p>Laying out the plan, Shoigu said that the expansion is required to protect \u201cthe new regions and crucial facilities of the Russian Federation,\u201d referring to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedefensepost.com\/2022\/10\/05\/putin-annex-regions-ukraine\/\">recently occupied Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>\u2018Self-Contained\u2019 Groups for Occupied Territories<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The expansion will see \u201ctwo new inter-branch strategic territorial formations\u201d in the Moscow and Leningrad military districts, \u201cas well as self-contained groups of forces in the new regions of the Russian Federation,\u201d Shoigu said.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally, Russia will reorganize seven motorized rifle brigades in the western, central, and eastern military districts, the northern fleet, and include \u201cthree motorized rifle divisions as part of the land forces, and two airborne assault divisions as part of the airborne troops.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>New Corps for Border With Finland\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The plan also calls for a new army corps in the Republic of Karelia and the reinforcement of the navy, aerospace forces, and strategic missile forces.<\/p>\n<p>The country considers Karelia important, as neighboring Finland \u2014 along with Sweden \u2014 has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedefensepost.com\/2022\/08\/04\/us-finland-sweden-nato\/\">applied to join NATO<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Shoigu\u2019s Proposals<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The defense minister had earlier proposed a Russian military comprising 695,000 \u201cprofessional contracted soldiers\u201d as opposed to conscripts.<\/p>\n<p>He also proposed to raise the age range of mandatory military service to 21-30 from the current 18-27.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s unclear whether the two proposals have been included in the latest plan.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Third Expansion Plan\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The plan comes after <strong>Vladimir Putin <\/strong>signed a decree in August <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedefensepost.com\/2022\/08\/25\/putin-increases-russian-army\/\">recruiting 137,000 soldiers<\/a> from January 1, increasing military manpower to 1.15 million.<\/p>\n<p>Russia also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedefensepost.com\/2022\/10\/28\/russia-mobilizes-reservists\/\">drafted up to 300,000 reservists in September<\/a> amid Ukraine war losses.<\/p>\n<p>Kremlin spokesman <strong>Dmitry Peskov <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/tylerpaper.com\/russia-to-boost-troops-in-west-expanding-army-to-1-5-million-people\/article_d2823910-96db-11ed-adbe-a7e7b17782e4.html\">said<\/a> the expansion is in response to the \u201cproxy war\u201d he claimed the US and its allies are waging against Russia in Ukraine.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedefensepost.com\/2023\/01\/18\/russia-military-expansion\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was announced AFTER Finland and Sweden revealed plans to join NATO. A new army corps will be deployed in the Republic of Karelia, which borders both countries<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":267208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-russia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=267206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267207,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267206\/revisions\/267207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/267208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=267206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=267206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=267206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}