Moscow has revealed no losses in the conflict since its first weeks, but Western officials and the Ukrainian government say they number in the thousands.
The increase in troops, which includes 137,000 military personnel to 1.15 million, will take effect on January 1, according to a decree published on the government’s legislative website.
The last time Putin set the size of the Russian army It was in November 2017, when the number of combat soldiers was set at 1.01 million out of a total of 1.9 million, if non-combatants are included.
Russia has not reported how many casualties it has suffered in Ukraine since the first weeks of the campaign, when it declared 1,351 of its soldiers dead.
Western estimates say the actual number could be at least 10 times higher, while Ukraine says it has killed or wounded at least 45,000 Russian soldiers since the conflict began on February 24, which Moscow describes as a special military operation.
kyiv has also been reluctant to release information on the number of its soldiers who have died in the war, but on Monday the head of Ukraine’s armed forces said nearly 9,000 service personnel had been killed in a rare update.
Putin’s decree did not inform how the increase in troops was going to be achieved, but it did instruct the government to allocate the corresponding budget.
According to an authorized annual report of the International Institute for Strategic StudiesRussia had 900,000 active troops at the beginning of this year and 2 million reservists who have served in the last five years.
Source: Ambito
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