Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree on compulsory conscription into the armed forces for the period from April to July. The provision, writes the Tass agency, concerns all citizens of the Russian Federation between the ages of 18 and 30 who are not in the reserve and who are subject to military conscription.
These are, writes Tass, 147,000 conscripts, who will be conscripted and presumably sent to fight in Ukraine by the summer. Discharge is also provided for soldiers who have completed their military service. According to official data, in the autumn 130,000 had been enrolled for a year.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has stepped up the Kremlin's rhetoric on the war in Ukraine and called it an existential and civilizational "holy war". This is a turning point for the Russian authorities who have so far carefully avoided officially framing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a war, speaking of a 'special operation'. In a new ideological and political document, Kirill - reports the Guardian - defined Putin's "special military operation" as a holy war (Svyashennaya Voyna) and a new phase in the Russian people's struggle for "national liberation... in southern Russia -Western", referring to eastern and south-eastern Ukraine. Kirill argued that the war in Ukraine is a holy war because Moscow defends "Holy Russia" and the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West "fallen into Satanism."
Armed terrorists have meanwhile been blocked in several apartments in residential buildings in Makhachkala and Kaspiysk in the Russian republic of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus. This was announced by the Tass news agency, citing the information center of the local national anti-terrorism committee. "In Dagestan the security services received information on the whereabouts of armed people involved in terrorist activities. This night they were blocked by special forces in several apartments in the residential areas of Makhachkala and Kaspiysk", reported the Tass source. Residents of nearby houses were evacuated.
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