Institute for the Study of War &
AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 30
Kateryna Stepanenko, Katherine Lawlor, Grace Mappes, Riley Bailey, George Barros,
and Frederick W. Kagan
September 30, 8:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is
updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not threaten an immediate nuclear attack to halt
the Ukrainian counteroffensives into Russian-occupied Ukraine during his speech
announcing Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory. ISW analysts broke down
Putin’s speech in a separate September 30 Special Report: “Assessing Putin’s Implicit Nuclear Threats
after Annexation.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the illegal Russian annexation of four
Ukrainian territories on September 30 without clearly defining the borders of those
claimed territories. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to specify the borders of the
newly annexed territories in a September 30 conversation with reporters: "[the] Donetsk and Luhansk
People's Republics [DNR and LNR] were recognized by Russia within the borders of 2014. As for the
territories of Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts, I need to clarify this. We will clarify everything today.”
DNR head Denis Pushilin added that even the federal district into which the annexed territories will be
incorporated remains unclear: “What will it be called, what are the borders—let's wait for the final
decisions, consultations are now being held on how to do it right.”
Russian officials may clarify those
boundaries and administrative allocations in the coming days but face an inherent problem: Ukrainian
forces still control large swathes of Donetsk and Zaporizhia and some areas of Luhansk and Kherson
oblasts, a military reality that is unlikely to change in the coming months.
Putin likely rushed the annexation of these territories before making even basic administrative
decisions on boundaries and governance. Russian officials have therefore not set clear policies or
conditions for proper administration. Organizing governance for these four forcibly annexed oblasts
would be bureaucratically challenging for any state after Russian forces systematically killed, arrested,
or drove out the Ukrainian officials who previously ran the regional administrations. But the
bureaucratic incompetence demonstrated by the Kremlin’s attempted partial mobilization of Russian
men suggests that Russian bureaucrats will similarly struggle to establish governance structures over a
resistant and unwilling population in the warzone that is Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
Putin announced that Russia’s usual autumn conscription cycle will start a month late
on November 1, likely because Russia’s partial mobilization of Russian men is taxing the
bureaucracy of the Russian military commissariats that would usually oversee the semi-
annual conscription cycle.
Putin’s September 30 decree calls for 120,000 Russian conscripts—
7,000 fewer than in autumn 2021. Neither Putin’s decree nor subsequent official statements clarified
whether Ukrainian civilians of conscription age (18-27) in Russia’s newly-annexed occupied Ukrainian
territories will be liable for conscription. A representative of Russia’s Main Organizational and
Mobilization Directorate, Rear Admiral Vladimir Tsimlyansky, claimed that no autumn 2022
conscripts would fight in the “special operation” in Ukraine, a promise Putin also made (and broke)
about the autumn 2021 and spring 2022 conscripts.
Russian conscripts are not legally deployable
overseas until they have received at least four months of training unless Putin were to declare martial
