Russia’s regular spring military draft campaign is proceeding as scheduled and there are no plans to send out mass electronic notices under a new system just signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, a top official said on Saturday. The announcement by Colonel Andrei Biryukov, an official in an armed forces department responsible for the draft, appeared aimed at quelling speculation that Russia may quickly use the new system to launch another mass call-up for the war in Ukraine. Russia is currently in the process of calling up 147,000 men aged 18 to 27 between April 1 and July 15 to perform compulsory military service as part of its longstanding twice-yearly conscription cycle. Biryukov said the first conscripts would be dispatched to “permanent deployment points on the territory of the Russian Federation” from April 20. He emphasised that some people were still entitled to defer their military service, and said there would be no mass mailings of new electronic summonses to people of conscript age. The current planned cohort of spring conscripts is 12,500 bigger than the 134,500 who were called up this time last year. Conscripts require months of training and Russia has said they will not be sent into war zones in Ukraine, after acknowledging cases where this had happened in the first weeks of the conflict last year. But they provide a pool of young, trained personnel who can then be encouraged or pressured into signing up as professional soldiers as Russia pursues its stated aim of boosting the armed forces by more than 30% to 1.5 million.