Russia plans to recruit special operations forces that left Afghanistan for Iran - military expert Hetman

He told about this on Espreso TV.

"The Russians really need a break, so on the one hand they are trying to sit down at the negotiating table, although the NSDC has already decided that there will be no negotiations until the withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine. And secondly, the Russian Federation wants to turn this war into a so-called trench war to conduct attrition warfare. This will give the enemy an opportunity to regroup their forces and pull up those reserves they are currently bringing in," the military expert commented.

Oleksiy Hetman added that mobilization in Russia has not been suspended and they can get up to one million people, and they still have an autumn draft to also recruit people.

"We also need to take into account the 40,000 servicemen who left Afghanistan for Iran after the American troops pulled out from there. And the plans of the Russian Federation to recruit these people, especially special operations forces (SOF), are known. This is what the head of the Afghan SOF said. Haibatullah Alizai, who wants to recruit 5,000 soldiers who were in the SOF of Afghanistan to wage war in Ukraine. Even now, in the city of Mashhad, where the base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is located, training is being held, and some of these mercenaries are already fighting on the side of the Russian Federation. They are working directly from the Wagner PMC. Such people are called commandos (specially trained military personnel - ed.), who have the specifics of crossing from one bank to another. Perhaps the Russians are planning something in this way from the point of view of an attack from the left bank of the Dnipro River to the right," he noted.

Hetman noted that Wagner PMC had already built bases for training mercenaries in Russia’s Kursk and Bryansk, and there are only carefully selected people there. That is, Prigozhin is engaged in training these military personnel in order to send them to the war in Ukraine.