on April 13, 2022, a Russian soldier stands guard at the Luhansk power plant in the town of Shchastya.

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• Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine will have access to free sperm-freezing services.
• The offer applies to “those called up for military service as part of the partial mobilization.”
• Soldiers want to freeze their sperm that their wives can access if they are killed in action, said local reports.

Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine will have access to free sperm freezing, reports the Russian state news agency TASS. 

According to Igor Trunov, president of the Russian Union of Lawyers, the government has approved the funding of sperm freezing, to be stored in cryobanks, for mobilized soldiers fighting in the invasion of Ukraine.

“The families of those called up for military service as part of the partial mobilization will receive free access to fertility treatment and the storage of biomaterial in a cryobank,” said Trunov, reported TASS.

According to The Times, quoting local media, there has been a surge in men headed to the front freezing their sperm that their wives can access if they are killed in action.

One medical center had reported a 30-fold increase in applications regarding storing, per The Times.

Putin launched his partial military mobilization of Russian military reservists in September, hoping to deploy 300,000 more soldiers to fight in his invasion of Ukraine, with the exact number of mobilized men still classified. 

Some, President Putin said, are trained for as little as 10 days, leading commentators to conclude they were effectively cannon fodder.

Indeed, reservists mobilized by the Russian military are being sent to fight in Ukraine despite having “serious, chronic health conditions,” the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) said in November. Other reports said that some mobilized soldiers were not even old enough to fight. 

In November, regional leaders in Russia wrote to President Putin, urging him to declare an end to his mobilization for the war in Ukraine.

The number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded fighting in Ukraine, where Putin’s forces have experienced a series of military setbacks in more than 300 days of fighting, remains unclear. 

A BBC Russia report from earlier this week said it had confirmed the death of 10,500 Russian soldiers, with 492 of these men thought to be mobilized soldiers, but it admitted: “that our list may contain at least 40-60% fewer names of the dead than actually buried in Russia.”

In November, a US military chief put the number of Russian soldiers killed or wounded at up to 100,000, according to CNN.