Russia ends massive call-up for military operation in Ukraine
Russia says it has finished calling up as many as 300,000 reservists for its ongoing military operation in neighboring Ukraine.
"The task set by you of [mobilizing] 300,000 people has been completed. No further measures are planned," Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin at a televised meeting in the Kremlin on Friday.
The defense chief said 82,000 had already been deployed and the rest were being trained.
Putin thanked reservists "for their dedication to duty, for their patriotism, for their firm determination to defend our country, to defend Russia, which means their home, their family, our citizens, our people."
This is Russia's first such mobilization since World War Two.
Both Putin and Shoigu acknowledged "problems" in the early days of the call-up. Putin said mistakes had probably been inevitable as Russia had not carried out a mobilization for such a long time.
Shoigu, however, said initial issues in supplying newly-mobilized troops had since been resolved.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, alleged that he doubted that Moscow would not be in need of more reservists.
Russian forces "are so poorly prepared and equipped, so brutally used by their command, that it allows us to presume that very soon Russia may need a new wave of people to send to the war," he claimed in his nightly televised address.
Russia launched the "special military operation" in Ukraine in late February.
The Kremlin says it launched the operation in order to defend the pro-Russian population in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk against persecution by Kiev.
Back in 2014, the two republics broke away from Ukraine, refusing to recognize a Western-backed Ukrainian government there that had overthrown a democratically-elected Russia-friendly administration.
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