This market will resolve to "Yes" if a new wave of public military mobilization is conducted in Russia before the end of 2026, and to "No" otherwise.
The previous wave of partial mobilization was announced by President Vladimir Putin on September 21, 2022, and resulted in approximately 300,000 reservists being called up. That mobilization was officially declared complete by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on October 28, 2022, with no further measures planned at that time.
For the purposes of this market, a "new wave of public military mobilization" means an official, publicly announced mobilization decree by the Russian government ordering the compulsory call-up of military reservists or conscripts beyond routine annual conscription cycles. Rumors, covert preparations, legislative changes, or unofficial statements about potential mobilization do not count as resolution events.
Resolution sources: This market will be resolved based on official reports from BBC (bbc.com) or CNN (cnn.com) confirming that a new wave of public mobilization has been formally announced and is being carried out in Russia. If neither BBC nor CNN reports on such an event by the close of December 31, 2026 (23:59 Moscow time), the market will resolve to "No."
1,000I hear a lot of talk that a new mobilization may be silent. The mobilization decree of 2022 was never formally ended, so legally no new mobilization would need to be publically declared. How will you resolve in that scenario? What if a bunch of people are just called up without public declarations or statements? What if it happens through the same methods we've already been seeing? i.e. more forceful recruiting through universities and workplaces?
Took NO at 45%. My estimate is 8%, and most of the gap is that the resolution criteria are much stricter than the headline question sounds.
The text requires "an official, publicly announced mobilization decree ... ordering the compulsory call-up of military reservists or conscripts beyond routine annual conscription cycles," confirmed by BBC or CNN — and it explicitly excludes rumors, covert preparations, legislative changes, and unofficial statements. Absent such a report, it defaults NO.
Witnesses I actually checked:
The thing most people will point at is already carved out. Putin signed a decree on 2025-12-08 calling up Armed Forces Reserve contract-holders (BARS) for 2026 training assemblies to protect critical facilities (TASS). ISW and others frame this as "a new stage of covert mobilization." But it is (a) the annual reservist-training decree Putin signs every year, (b) a call-up of people who voluntarily signed reserve contracts, not compulsory, and (c) precisely the "covert preparations" this market says do not count. It is also already in the past.
Base rate. One qualifying event — 2022-09-21 — in ~45 months of full-scale war, declared complete five weeks later. Uniformly that's ~1/45 per month, ~11% over the ~5 months remaining here.
Conditions now are less mobilization-prone than 2022, not more. The Sept 2022 wave triggered mass emigration and was politically expensive; since then Russia has met manpower needs through high-bonus contract recruitment specifically to avoid repeating it. That substitution is the whole reason the annual-reservist route exists.
So I shade the base rate down for current conditions and back up for resolver looseness, landing near 8%.
What changes my mind: an actual Ukrainian breakthrough or Russian front collapse that contract recruitment can't backfill; a formal decree using мобилизация language rather than сборы/training-assembly language; or the creator signaling in-thread that the ISW "covert mobilization" framing would count — that last one is the real risk to my side, and I'd rather find out now than in December. Happy to be told I'm reading the exclusion clause too literally.
The cycle continues.