Russia’s new reservist law looks like another ‘quiet mobilization’ It’s October 31, 2025. Here are two stories worth your attention.

Who ya gonna call when the country’s not ready for Round Two? The reservists!

Both houses of Russia’s Parliament have passed legislation allowing the state to call up reservists to protect “critical infrastructure” during special drills. In practice, this will likely involve defending energy, transport, and industrial sites from Ukrainian drone attacks. The number of reservists in Russia currently stands at about 100,000 men — up from just 2,000 in mid-2021, before the buildup in anticipation of the invasion of Ukraine. Meduza located a copy of Putin’s August 2021 executive order, shared in a General Staff presentation. In it, the military proposed creating specialized state-owned enterprises composed exclusively of reservists. (Such enterprises already exist in the Belgorod and Kursk regions, where they were introduced after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny.)

Meduza studied the new legislation and concluded that it doesn’t explicitly guarantee that reservists’ “special drills” will be limited to the current 60-day term. At the same time, officials have informally promised to continue this practice. Currently, if a reservist signs a contract for active military service, he is removed from Russia’s mobilization reserve rolls. Still, reservists remain natural candidates for mobilization, given their recently confirmed medical status and previous training. However, while another round of mobilization can’t be ruled out, Russia’s new reservist legislation looks more like a new mechanism for drawing people into the armed services without resorting to a direct mass call-up. In the General Staff’s presentation — clearly not meant for public consumption — the military said plainly that assigning reservists to state-owned enterprises would eliminate the “need to involve by force civilians lacking the necessary skills for such operations.”

Europeans should know that Russians fleeing military service have found it increasingly difficult to secure sanctuary in parts of the E.U. For example, in mid-June 2025, a 21-year-old Russian man defied his conscription summons and boarded a train bound for Kaliningrad, leapt from the railcar as it passed through Lithuania. Daniil Mukhametov then traveled to Finland, hoping for a better chance at asylum. Instead, he became one of more than 100 Russian nationals Finland has ordered to be deported. Local officials say they’re not bound by UN rules to treat conscription as sufficient grounds for asylum, wrongly claiming that Russia has formally ended its mobilization drive. Mukhametov awaits deportation back to Lithuania, and possibly to Russia thereafter.

Vladimir Putin has 9M729 problems, but who’s counting?

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha says Moscow has attacked Ukraine 23 times this year with ground-launched 9M729 missiles, whose secret development prompted Donald Trump to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. According to Kyiv, the 9M729 attacks began just a few days after Trump met Putin in Alaska at a controversial summit. “Russia’s use of the INF-banned 9M729 against Ukraine in the past months demonstrates Putin’s disrespect for the United States and President Trump’s diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Sybiha said in written remarks, reported by Reuters. Asked about Kyiv’s 9M729 allegations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred reporters to Russia’s Defense Ministry, though he reiterated Moscow’s claim that the missile did not violate the INF Treaty’s range limit of 500 kilometers (310 miles).

Americans should know that Kyiv and Moscow have competed publicly and privately for the White House’s favor since Donald Trump returned to the presidency. Both Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin have seemed, at various moments, to have won Trump over to their perspective, only for the U.S. president to change his signaling days later. Both sides have refined their outreach to Washington since January, concocting new transactional frames for bilateral relations with the U.S., ways to stroke Trump’s ego, and warnings that others are “disrespecting” or somehow trying to dupe the great American leader.