Russian President’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said he knew nothing about recruitment campaigns for students and employees of companies in the Ryazan region to participate in the war with Ukraine.
“I have not seen them, and I do not know if this information is correct,” Peskov told reporters. At the same time, the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation admitted that a recruitment campaign is underway in Russia for “new troops,” without clarifying that we are talking about troops of unmanned systems.
According to Peskov, “there are proposals” for those who wish to serve in these “new forces” (hereinafter indicated by quotes from “I Listened”):
This offer exists, as they say, on the market, and applies equally to everyone: workers and students. For non-workers, for the unemployed, and so on. So, this is a completely open proposal, a proposal for a new type of armed forces.
Journalists also asked Peskov to comment on reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed the Ministry of Digital Development to take measures to limit the use of VPN services to bypass blocking. “I don’t know anything about such a thing,” Peskov said.
The newspaper “Fridili” reported on April 1 that the authorities had set a target for Russian universities to recruit contract soldiers for the war – 2% of the student population. Before that, “Important Stories” wrote that the Russian Defense Ministry plans to recruit 78.8 thousand people into the forces of unmanned systems by the end of 2026, including from among the students.
At the end of March, it became known that the governor of the Ryazan region, Pavel Malikov, signed a decree in which he required companies to carry out “the tasks of selecting candidates for military service under a contract.” The document assumes that, regardless of the form of ownership, each organization in the period from March 20 to September 20 must find and send to war from two (for organizations with 150 employees) to five people (for organizations with 500 or more employees).
The head of the Ministry of Digital Development, Maksut Shadiyev, said at the end of March that his ministry was tasked with limiting the use of VPNs in Russia. Shadayev wrote in the chat of the specialized community “MIT – We are IT” in the State Messenger Max program, that the Ministry of Digital Development is an executive body and is obliged to carry out the tasks assigned to it. The publication did not specify from whom the corresponding order came.