Hiding all summer

A bill has been submitted to the Duma according to which the spring conscription will be extended: if until now it ended on July 15, now deputies from United Russia from the Defense Committee propose to end it as early as August 31. However, they want to shorten the autumn conscription by a month so that it begins not on October 1, but on November 1. Here, however, it seems they won’t insist much. The head of the government apparatus, Vladimir Volodin, approved the bill, but he did not like the idea of ​​reduction, and he proposed with the autumn appeal to leave everything as it is. And United Russia is unlikely to argue. In addition, it is proposed to extend the period of dismissal after the demobilization order by five months - thus, the service life of some conscripts may extend to almost a year and a half.

Besides the fact that this wonderful innovation has an obvious advantage for the army authorities, that it will be possible to attract even more people into the armed forces (and the fact that there will be a lot of unfit and unprepared for service is, apparently, the tenth thing), they also want to use it to increase the number of trained conscript soldiers and sergeants. Only for this it is necessary to further reduce the period of their training in educational units: from five to three months. And then, if conscripts take up arms not twice a year, but in a certain stream with a short break, then it will be possible to conduct three graduations of specialists a year. Another thing is that some experts believe that you cannot train a competent specialist in three months—it takes a year or two.

Now graduates are reassured that no one will miss them when they enter the university: they say that until September 1 they are considered schoolchildren and thus have a deferment. True, this is not implemented in practice: as the coordinator of the public initiative “Citizen and the Army” Sergei Krivenko told Vedomosti, when the spring conscription period was extended from June 30 to July 15, graduates who were planning to enroll were immediately seized.

Krivenko also noted that current measures will solve the problem of increasing the number of conscripts only for a short time. The demographic hole persists, and, in his opinion, sooner or later the military authorities will seek the return of the two-year service period (unless, of course, they suddenly see the light and want to turn to the contract system). It is also worth recalling that not long ago a plan was considered to increase the conscription age to 30 years.