Russia wants to raise conscription age to 30 this spring

Russia has decided to raise the conscription age - citizens under the age of 30 will be drafted in the military as early as this spring.

Source: Andrey Kartapolov, Chairman of the Russian State Duma Defence Committee, in an interview with the Parliamentary Newspaper [official weekly publication of the Russian Federal Assembly]

Details: According to Kartapolov, it is planned that the upper limit of the conscription age for military service will be raised by 3 years (from the current 27 to 30), while the lower limit will remain the same as before at 18 years.

Raising the conscription age in Russia will take from 1 to 3 years, and the process itself will take place in stages, but will begin as early as this spring, Kartapolov said. 

Quote: "Before the start of the spring conscription, each military commissariat will have to figure out how many people it has falling under the new requirements. Thereafter, [military enlistment offices have – ed.] to reorganise existing data to meet military tasks. Let’s say that a military enlistment office has one hundred people aged 21 to 30, who have not completed military service and who do not have sufficient grounds for it. And the task is [to conscript – ed.] 200 people. Accordingly, half of them will be people aged 18, as was the case before, and half will be people from 21 to 30 years of age."

Details: According to Kartapolov, this is how Russia will gradually switch to the new system, and in each mobilisation campaign, it will gradually increase the conscription age.

This will require "a whole set of amendments" to the current legislation – in particular, to the law on military duty and military service, Kartapolov added. 

Note: The idea of raising the conscription age was first announced by Sergey Shoigu, the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation in late December 2022.

If these changes take effect, the minimum age of conscripts in the Russian Federation will be 21 instead of 18, and the maximum age will be 30 instead of 27.

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