Vladimir Putin has launched a vast recruitment drive to drag another 409,000 Russians into his war machine as the Kremlin desperately tries to replenish its battered forces without triggering another politically explosive mobilisation.
Regional authorities have been handed recruitment quotas by Moscow and ordered to find enough men to keep Russia’s frontline units supplied with fresh troops.
But officials are increasingly resorting to intimidation and coercion, targeting men with debts, criminal investigations and other vulnerabilities in an effort to meet the Kremlin’s demands.
“They know who has debts, who is under investigation and who recently lost their driving licence, and those are the people they target,” said Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, the Kyiv Post reported.
The grim recruitment campaign exposes the mounting pressure on Putin’s military nearly four years after he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Kremlin is offering huge signing bonuses worth millions of roubles in some regions, while police and military officials have reportedly detained men in streets, workplaces and factories to pressure them into signing contracts.
In Rostov, authorities reportedly detained 35 factory workers during a recruitment operation.
In the Khabarovsk region, police claimed to have held 2,500 recruitment “conversations” last year — but persuaded just 32 people to sign contracts.
The Kremlin’s target is enormous. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and current deputy chairman of its Security Council, claimed almost 200,000 people signed military contracts during the first six months of this year.
Yet the figures reveal the difficulty of sustaining the system.
Federal enlistment bonuses fell to 71,216 in the first quarter, according to analysis of budget data — the lowest first-quarter total for three years.
Russia is increasingly relying on money and coercion rather than another formal mobilisation, after Putin’s 2022 call-up of 300,000 reservists triggered panic and sent hundreds of thousands fleeing abroad.
The latest campaign appears designed to prevent a repeat.
“Putin is clearly postponing another wave of mobilisation,” said Grigory Sverdlin, founder of an organisation helping Russians evade military service.
But the Kremlin’s recruitment machine is feeding a war that continues to consume men at a staggering rate.
New contract soldiers are primarily replacing losses rather than creating a powerful reserve. Despite the steady flow of recruits, Russia’s territorial gains remain limited.
Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned that Russia’s deployed force has grown even as the scale of its offensive operations has declined.
If recruitment falters, he said, Russian units could once again face severe manpower shortages — potentially leaving them vulnerable on the battlefield.
And behind the Kremlin’s grand claims of military strength lies another growing problem: desertion.
At least 28,000 Russian servicemen have been convicted of abandoning their units, according to rights campaigners, while Ukrainian analysts believe the true figure could be twice as high.
For Putin, the choice is becoming increasingly brutal, keep paying ever more to persuade Russians to fight, squeeze reluctant men into uniform — or risk the political explosion of another mobilisation.
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