A Moscow area military commissar announced a return to two-year mandatory service. The Defense Ministry denies it.

Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Fotin, the military commissar for the cities of Dmitrov, Taldom, and Dubna, in the Moscow region, announced that in 2023 Russia plans to increase the term of mandatory military service to two years.

“Citizens called up in the spring will serve for a year and a half, and those called up in the fall of 2023 will serve for a full two years,” Fotin said on the air on local television station Dmitrov TV, citing “official information” from the Moscow region’s military enlistment office.

The military commissar called the decision to increase the length of service “quite logical,” referring to the entry of Russia’s “northern neighbors” into NATO. “Accordingly, it will be necessary to make new formations and military units, and to staff them not only with contract soldiers, but with conscripts,” he said.

Shortly after media picked up the segment, it was deleted from YouTube.

Journalists from the publication Msk1 reached Fotin for a comment on the segment, and he said, “I said a lot there. Everything depends on how it’s shown. You can show the material you receive in different ways.” Speaking to the publication Baza, he added that the video “is two years old.”

On December 17, the Russian Ministry of Defense posted a message on its Telegram channel, signed by Military Commissar for the Moscow region Alexey Astakhov, denying Fotin’s announcement. “At present, the Ministry of Defense is not considering any changes to the legal code of the Russian Federation concerning changes to the length of military service by conscription,” it said.

Pavel Chikov, head of the human rights group Agora, believes that Fotin’s announcement about an increase in the length of service terms was intentional. “Throwing around an increase in the length of mandatory service is meant to get conscripts to go to the enlistment office. Recruitment plans are on fire,” he posted on Twitter.

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According to the law “On military obligation and military service,” the term for military service for conscripts has been 12 months since 2008.