Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a major buildup of his country’s military forces on Thursday in an apparent effort to replenish troops that have suffered heavy losses in six months of bloody war and prepare for a long, hard battle in Ukraine. The move to increase troop numbers by 137,000, or 13 percent, to 1.15 million by the end of the year comes amid chilling developments on the ground in Ukraine: — Fueling fears of a nuclear disaster, the Zaporizhzhia power station in the middle of fighting in southern Ukraine was cut off from the power grid for the first time in its history, after fires destroyed the last working transmission line, Ukrainian authorities said . The plant was later reconnected to the grid, a local official based in Russia said. — The death toll from a Russian rocket attack on a train station and surrounding area on Ukraine’s Independence Day has risen to 25, Ukrainian authorities said. Russia said it targeted a military train and claimed to have killed more than 200 Ukrainian reservists in Wednesday’s attack. Putin’s decree did not specify whether the expansion would be achieved by expanding the military, recruiting more volunteers or both. But some Russian military analysts predicted a greater reliance on volunteers because of Kremlin concerns about a possible domestic backlash from an expanded camp. The move will boost Russia’s armed forces to a total of 2.04 million, including 1.15 million troops. Western estimates of Russian dead in the Ukraine war range from more than 15,000 to more than 20,000 — more than the Soviet Union lost during its decade-long war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon said last week that up to 80,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded, eroding Moscow’s ability to launch major offensives. The Kremlin has said that only volunteer contract soldiers are taking part in the Ukraine war. But more willing soldiers may be hard to come by, and military analysts said planned troop levels may still be insufficient to sustain operations. Retired Russian colonel Viktor Murakovsky said in comments to the Moscow-based online news agency RBC that the Kremlin would likely try to continue relying on volunteers and predicted that would account for most of the increase. Another Russian military expert, Alexei Leonkov, noted that training in complex modern weapons typically takes three years. And draftees serve only one year. “A draft will not help with this, so there will be no increase in the number of lottery tickets,” Leonkov was quoted as saying by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. Fears of a Chernobyl-like disaster have grown in Ukraine amid clashes surrounding the Russian-held Zaporizhia plant. Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of bombing the site. The damaged line in Thursday’s incident apparently carried outgoing electricity, without affecting a separate line used to power vital cooling systems for the plant’s reactors. But the cut underscored concerns about the plant. Elsewhere on the battlefront, the deadly strike at the train station in Chaplyne, a town of about 3,500 in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, came as Ukraine braced for attacks linked to the national holiday and the war semester, which also hit two on Wednesday. Ukraine’s deputy chief of staff, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, did not say whether all 25 people killed were civilians. If it were, it would amount to one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in weeks. Thirty one people were reported injured. The dead included an 11-year-old boy who was found under the rubble of a house and a 6-year-old who was killed in a car fire near the train station, authorities said. Russia’s defense ministry said its forces used an Iskander missile to strike a military train carrying Ukrainian troops and equipment to the front line in eastern Ukraine. The ministry claimed that more than 200 reservists were “destroyed on their way to the combat zone”. The attack served as a painful reminder of Russia’s continued ability to cause large-scale suffering six months after the war. Wednesday’s national holiday celebrated Ukraine’s 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. Tetiana Kvitnytska, deputy head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional health department, said those injured in the train station attack suffered head injuries, broken limbs, burns and shrapnel wounds. After attacks in which civilians were killed, the Russian government has repeatedly claimed that its forces only target legitimate military targets. Hours before the carnage at the train station, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu insisted the military was doing everything it could to save civilians, even at the cost of slowing its offensive in Ukraine. In April, a Russian missile attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed more than 50 people as crowds of mostly women and children tried to flee the fighting. The attack was denounced as a war crime. In Moscow on Thursday, Dmitry Medvedev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said Western hopes of a Ukrainian victory were futile and stressed that the Kremlin would press home what it called a “special military operation”, leaving only two possible Results. “One is the achievement of all the goals of the special military operation and the recognition of this result by Kyiv,” Medvedev said on the channel of his messaging app. “The second is a military coup in Ukraine followed by recognition of the results of the special operation.”
