2022 Russian mobilization

On 21 September 2022, Russia declared that it was initiating a "partial mobilization" of military reservists to bolster the country's war effort against Ukraine. The announcement came after the Russian government's decision to conduct "annexation referendums" throughout occupied Ukraine—on behalf of the entirety of four Ukrainian regions that it only controlled in part: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. The mobilization is widely believed to have been introduced to address the Russian military's heavy casualties and lack of manpower, particularly in the face of major Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv.

Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu announced that Russia had a "huge mobilization reserve" and planned to mobilize 300,000 recruits. The precise details of the mobilization plans are currently unclear, however, as the exact number of people to be mobilized is classified. In addition to Russia proper, tens of thousands of people were mobilized in Donetsk and Luhansk to fight for the Russian separatist militias that had been active in those regions since 2014.

On 28 October, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that mobilization had been completed. However, it has been speculated that this announcement only indicated an end to formal mobilization and that covert mobilization would still occur until the president's signing of a relevant decree. Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov has refuted this claim, but in late December 2022, numerous military analysts and media outlets maintained that mobilization efforts were persisting across Russia. On 18 May 2023, the Supreme Court of Russia issued Ruling No. 11 "On the practice of consideration by the courts of criminal cases for crimes against military service": the second paragraph states that the period of mobilization (partial or general) begins from the date and time of the start of mobilization, as established by the relevant presidential decree, and ends with the date and time of cancellation (termination) of mobilization. Thus, the September 2022 mobilization for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is still in force as of September 2025.