Last week, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the mobilization of 300,000 Russian reservists is now complete.
The defense minister claimed that 82,000 are in Ukraine, of which 41,000 have been sent to military units in the country.
The rest of the 300,000 are educated in Russia.
- What we know about those mobilized is that some are actually volunteers, but that quite a few, or perhaps a majority, are forcibly recruited and sent to the front after a short training, says SVT's Russia correspondent Bert Sundström.
According to Sundström, the soldiers come from all over Russia, including big cities like Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but a large part comes from smaller villages and provinces.
- There is a preponderance of soldiers who are picked from less affluent areas.
One of these is Nikita Perlin from Yetkul, a small community near the border with Kazakhstan.
Just five days after being called up, he was dead.
- There was no training as promised, he was sent there as cannon fodder, says friend Anastasia Kemer to the AP news agency.
The war does not end
Bert Sundström does not believe that unjustified ill-equipped soldiers will mean that Russia is about to lose this war.
- Russia has several other combat forces that they use extensively, robots, cruise missiles and artillery that attack infrastructure and also civilian targets such as residential buildings, so the war will probably - unfortunately - continue for a long time, I think.