4.2.6. Conscription quotas and raids

4.2.6. Conscription quotas and raids

As noted by Sergey Krivenko in an interview with the Danish Immigration Service (DIS) and the Swedish Migration Office, since 2022, military enlistment offices have increasingly employed the so-called ‘one-day-draft’ practice whereby persons, who came to a military enlistment office ‘for a specific purpose’, such as collecting documents, are immediately conscripted into the military service. This practice is more common in larger cities, as residents of rural areas tend to adhere to their conscription summonses ‘to a greater extent than in larger and more densely populated places.’813

During the conscription period of spring 2025, police conducted raids to meet conscription quotas across the country,814 including in Tatarstan, Dagestan, the Kursk region and St. Petersburg.815 According to organisations helping conscripts, differently from autumn 2024, in spring 2025, these raids were not random, as police followed specific ‘lists’ rather than ‘picking up everyone on the street.’816 Most reports on raids were from Moscow,817 where police detained individuals with pending conscription summonses,818 conducting raids at fitness clubs819 and detaining men at metro stations.820 Most persons who were detained were identified through CCTV cameras and detained in metro, or located at their homes or workplaces.821

During the spring 2025 raids, legal grounds for exemption or deferral from military service as well as for conscientious objection were often ignored,822 whereas the authorities attempted to conscript individuals, or make a conscription decision, within one day.823 In St. Petersburg, police reportedly detained at least 200 conscript-age men and attempted to send some of them to military service within 24 hours, including those ‘with chronic illnesses and medical deferrals.’824

During the autumn 2025 draft, individuals were reportedly similarly detained in the metro, near homes, and on the street.825 As noted by a human rights lawyer, conscription-related raids in Russia typically occur towards the end of the draft period, when regional military enlistment offices struggle to meet their conscription quotas. In these cases, military enlistment offices involve law enforcement, primarily the police, to meet the recruitment plan. Raids are more common in major cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, which have higher living standards and lower number of people willing to take part in the obligatory military service, whereas quotas in these locations are higher due to higher population density.826 According to Huseyn Aliyev, conscription quotas remain unmet in almost every region, with Chechnya being ‘an outstanding exception’, consistently claiming to have exceeded its quotas for both conscripts and mobilised personnel.827