MOSCOW. Oct 1 (Interfax) - A total of 132,500 young men will be drafted into the Russian army starting on October 1, according to the head of the Russian General Staff's Main Mobilization Directorate, Lt. Gen. Yevgeny Burdinsky.
"In line with the Russian president's Executive Order N. 552 dated September 28, 2018, 132,500 young men will be drafted into the army in fall of 2018. This is a bit more than we drafted in spring of this year (128,000) but less than last fall when 134,000 conscripts were assigned to forces," Burdinsky told the Russian Armed Forces' official newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda in an interview published on Monday.
"The draft will take place in all the 85 constituent territories of Russia. The drafting procedure will not differ much from the previous one," Burdinsky said.
"There will still be some specifics. For example, the General Staff, acting consistent with the current laws, has made a list of sub-Arctic areas and similar territories where the draft takes place only once a year. Therefore, there will be no autumnal draft in 24 municipalities of five Russian constituent territories, namely the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the Transbaikal, Kamchatka, and Khabarovsk territories, and the Chukchi Autonomous Region, where men were drafted into the army in spring," he said.
The staffing of research and sports companies will continue this fall, Burdinsky said.
"About 2,100 conscripts have served there [in research companies) since day one; 320 of them have been appointed researchers and given the lieutenant's rank, and 328 servicemen transferred to the reserve have continued their career with defense plants," Burdinsky said.
"About 1,600 men representing 44 types of sports have served in sports companies since the latter's founding day. These include six merited masters of sports, 125 international-class masters of sports, 885 masters of sports, and 530 candidates for master of sports," he said.