As anxiety over rumors of a forced military mobilization began to sweep through Moscow, Eradzh, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, turned to his A.I. assistant to parse the news and calculate the likelihood of a draft.

Eventually, the probability became high enough that he asked the program to find him a cheap flight out of Russia. In about a week, Eradzh will fly to Cyprus and spend at least two months away from Moscow.

Ticking off points on his fingers, Eradzh explained his logic as Russia has churned through tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers lured to the battlefield in Ukraine through fat payouts, while making only small gains in territory.

“Have the contract soldiers most likely run out? They’ve run out,” he said. “Have we captured anything? We haven’t. Did the negotiations lead anywhere? They didn’t. Will Putin dig his heels in? He will dig his heels in.”

“Will there be a mobilization? Most likely, yes,” he said recently in a cafe in central Moscow. Eradzh, like others interviewed, agreed to talk only on the condition that his last name not be used.

For months, the fear of a possible mobilization — a second wave of the draft that began in September 2022 — has become a fixture of daily life across Russia.

Rumors that Moscow might force more people to fight in the war after a parliamentary election on Sept. 20 have filled online information spaces and are discussed in cafes, on trains and in smoking areas near offices.

The Kremlin has denied that any mobilization is being prepared. On Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin called the reports “complete nonsense” and an “information attack against Russia.” On Thursday, he doubled down on his denial, saying that Russia had enough troops and that “as of today, there is no scenario that would require a mobilization.”

As the rumors have swirled, the Russian authorities have tried to project calm. Moscow has remained as orderly and manicured as ever, with pavilions on its central boulevards offering free medical checkups under the slogan, “Your choice is to live longer!”

Still, many people are not convinced by the government’s assurances. They cite previous denials by the Kremlin that turned out not to be true, like the repeated ones in 2022 that Russia was not going to invade Ukraine or conduct a wave of mobilization that September.

Russians point to separate, so far isolated examples of more hard-line recent recruitment tactics reported in the Penza region, southeast of Moscow. They also note that Mr. Putin’s decree ordering the draft back in 2022 technically remains in force, and therefore a mobilization could happen stealthily.

Fears have been fueled by international media reports citing Western intelligence officials, who say that Russia is losing more troops than it recruits, and statements from Ukraine’s leaders. In August, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russia planned to draft 300,000 people after the parliamentary election. Mr. Zelensky made similar a prediction in April 2024.

When Russia conducted its first large forced mobilization in 2022, hundreds of thousands of men fled Russia. The draft shook Russian society to such an extent that officials scrambled to halt it within weeks.

That mobilization was intended to shore up a Russian Army that was on the brink of collapse in Ukraine, military analysts said. Outnumbered, Moscow’s forces abandoned large swaths of occupied land in Ukraine’s east and south, leaving their equipment behind.

Russia’s current situation on the front line is nowhere near what it was in fall 2022, said Dmitri Kuznets, a military analyst.

Mr. Kuznets said that, contrary to Western assessments, Russia was still recruiting more people than it lost on the battlefield, according to verifiable data from the Russian budget, notary databases and obituary notices. He also said that unlike in 2022, the Russian state lacked the money to pay conscripts in another large-scale draft wave.

“Theoretically, it could be used to create new units and formations,” Mr. Kuznets said, referring to a draft. But the potential gains would be outweighed by the risk of mass public anger at the Kremlin, he added.

Still, Mr. Kuznets said, Mr. Putin might not make a rational decision. And while Russia might not suffer from an acute shortage of personnel overall, it lacks specific types of servicemen — most of all nimble drone operators, he said.

In the end, perhaps only Mr. Putin knows whether there will be a mobilization. That has left ordinary Russians unsure what to do next.

Aleksandr, 36, a fitness coach in Moscow, said he had simply gotten tired of losing sleep and “endlessly wondering whether it’s going to happen or not.”

At the end of August, he flew to Thailand with his wife, who is also a fitness coach and who wept, he said, over losing her life in Russia. As a former serviceman in a special unit, he said, he faced too high a risk of being drafted.

Ivan, 24, a civil engineer, said he and his friends specifically planned their annual vacation abroad to cover the period just before and after the parliamentary election. They will monitor the news while hiking in Georgia, he said.

Ilya, 26, another engineer, said he had decided to leave after Yabloko, the only political party running on a pro-peace platform, was removed from the ballot. He also cited gasoline shortages caused by Ukrainian strikes and reports of increased harassment of travelers at the border as factors in his decision.

“You don’t know what the authorities might do to limit your movement and your efforts to keep yourself alive and well,” he said.

Others who would like to leave lack the means. Some said they were trying to get official residency in Moscow, which many believe will be shielded from a draft. Others have withdrawn money from their bank accounts, fearing that the funds could be frozen if they receive an online summons and fail to appear at an enlistment office.

Mikhail, 40, who works in the film industry, said that he had sought help from a psychiatrist after scrolling through so many reports about the possibility of mobilization.

“I’m trying to bring myself back from this field of rumors and speculation into something that I really know,” he said, “but actually I know nothing.”

Ilya, 31, who works in logistics, said he was not concerned about mobilization as such, but about the effect it could have on the Russian economy. It could halt already slow growth and force more companies to close because of a lack of personnel. “We would have to lay off people at work,” he said.

Many said that another wave of the draft would be much harder to escape than the one in 2022, after a digitization of the government’s conscription system.

Summonses to report to the military are now delivered electronically. Those who do not comply face automatic bans on leaving the country, as well as suspensions of driver’s licenses and the right to conduct property transactions.

The system of automated penalties is not yet fully working because of a lack of coordination between government agencies and technical difficulties, said Grigory Sverdlin, founder of Idite Lesom — meaning get lost in Russian — a group that helps Russians evade military conscription.

Konstantin, a yachting coach in St. Petersburg, said that while he had stayed away from Russia during the first wave of mobilization in 2022, this time he planned to sit tight.

“During that first draft, a lot of my friends made drastic moves — spending heaps of money, trying to get citizenship elsewhere, things like that,” he said. “But eventually, they all came back.”