How Russia Is Recruiting for the Long War

Partial mobilisation 2022

To date, there have been three, partly over­lapping phases in the recruitment of per­sonnel for the war against Ukraine. First, after the full-scale invasion had been launched with too few soldiers in expec­tation of a quick victory, and Russia had suffered a high number of losses within the first few weeks, the Kremlin took hasty ad hoc measures to compensate, including the vastly expanded deployment of private military companies.

When those efforts proved insufficient, Putin initiated the second recruitment phase by announcing partial mobilisation on 21 September 2022. As part of that drive, 300,000 men – the so-called mobiki – had been called up by the end of October 2022. According to Putin, it was only reservists with undefined specialisations who had been mobilised, while conscripts and em­ployees of the defence industry were exempt. However, media outlets reported that people over the age limit and those with health problems were called up, too. Ill-equipped and poorly trained, the mobiki were sent directly to the front.

The partial mobilisation was unpopular and entailed domestic political risks for the Kremlin. Hundreds of thousands of men, many of them well educated, left the coun­try. Surveys conducted by Levada suggest that unconditional support for the “special military operation” had fallen from 52 per cent in March 2022 to 44 per cent in Octo­ber 2022, while negative emotions such as fear and anxiety had increased. Despite the ever more drastically shrinking space in which public discontent could be voiced, there were several protests against the par­tial mobilisation and attacks on enlistment offices. The Kremlin responded with a mix­ture of harsh repression and improved financial benefits for those mobilised: the protests were quickly crushed and the mobiki were granted the same pay and dis­ability and survivor benefits as military personnel serving under contract.

At the end of October 2022, the then defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, declared that the partial mobilisation had been com­pleted. But the surviving mobiki continue to be deployed in the war zone to this day as Putin’s decree set no time limit and has still not been formally revoked. In order to reduce the risk of discontent among large swathes of the population by announcing a new round of (partial) mobilisation, the Kremlin has so far opted to ensure that the human costs of compulsory mobilisation are con­fined to a fairly small group of people and thereby contained.

Covert mobilisation

In the third recruitment phase – which is ongoing – the Kremlin is focusing on so‑called “covert mobilisation”. This term refers to the continuous recruitment of “volunteers”, who fall into two categories: kontraktniki and fighters from a broad range of volunteer formations. The Kremlin’s calculation is that the potential for dis­content in society is lower under “covert mobilisation” than under a second round of compulsory mobilisation. That is because those who go off to fight are formally cat­egorised as volunteers even if they have been recruited through the exploitation of power imbalances or through the use of deception or coercion.

Kontraktniki

In March 2020, Russia had 405,000 contract soldiers, according to official sources, and that figure was set to rise to 500,000 by 2027. After the war had begun, the target figures were hiked significantly and the timeframe for achieving them shortened. In December 2022, the minister of defence announced that 695,000 kontraktniki would be serving in the armed forces by 2026; one year later, in December 2023, he called for 745,000 contract soldiers by 2027. In con­trast with the military reform of 2008, the recruitment of kontraktniki from 2022 onwards has not been aimed primarily at professionalising the armed forces but at recruiting as many soldiers as possible to be sent to the front line as quickly as possible.

Russia’s leadership is not following a master plan that has been drawn up in detail. Rather it is proceeding step by step via numerous separate measures.

In order to expand the recruitment pool, the age limits have been gradually raised. In May 2022, the 40-year age limit for kon­traktniki was abolished; and since then, applicants have been able to sign a contract up to the age of 65.

At the same time, it has become easier to recruit conscripts, foreign nationals and prison inmates. Since 2023, conscripts have been able to sign up as contract soldiers from the first month of service rather than the third, as was the case previously. Before the full-scale invasion, foreigners were accepted as kontraktniki only up to the age of 30 and with sufficient knowledge of Rus­sian, but that age limit was raised in May 2022 and language skills no longer deemed a formal criterion. Since June 2023, pris­oners can sign a contract for the so-called “Storm-Z” units, thereby legalising a prac­tice that had existed since the beginning of that year.

In order to encourage the recruitment of kontraktniki, the Ministry of Defence adver­tises high wages and generous social ben­efits, the possibility of remission of punish­ment and supposedly easier contract con­ditions. Before the full-scale invasion, contract soldiers received a monthly wage equivalent to of €330; today they earn at least €2,110 a month. In addition, there is a one-off recruitment bonus of around €2,000, which is significantly higher in some regions. Given that the national aver­age income is €800 a month and just €400 in the poorer regions, where most of the recruits come from, it is possible for con­tract soldiers to earn as much in one year in the army as in several years in a civilian job. Moreover, there is the entitlement to relatively high payments in the event of disability (€30,000) and death (€50,000). Since the end of September 2022, the pro­cedure for foreign recruits to obtain Russian citizenship has been simplified: whereas previously they had to complete a five-year contract in the armed forces, a period of service of just one year is now sufficient for them and their family members to qualify for Russian citizenship. Prison inmates who sign up as contract soldiers can have their sentence reduced or be pardoned if they are decorated.

Besides incentives, there are other factors that play a decisive role in the recruitment of contract soldiers – namely, deception and coercion. For example, conscripts can easily be pressurised into signing a contract as they are serving far from home and are often subject to systematic harassment by superiors under the practice of hazing (dedovshchina). Media reports suggest that foreign citizens have been either deceived about the nature of their prospective em­ployment or, if guilty of having broken the law, given the choice of serving a prison sentence or joining the army. It is particularly easy for government agencies to ex­ploit the power they inevitably hold over prison inmates.

The new one-year contract demonstrates just how easily even supposed facilitating measures can end up being used to coerce. The one-year period mentioned in the con­tract applies on paper only, as Putin stipu­lated in the partial mobilisation decree of September 2022 that the contracts of all kontraktniki are to remain valid until the end of the “special military operation”. During this period, the contracts of service­men cannot be cancelled, while all con­tracts about to expire must be renewed. This means that de facto there is a perma­nent mobilisation under way not only of the mobiki but also of the kontraktniki.

New round of compulsory mobilisation?

Not only is covert mobilisation expensive; it also carries the risk of diffusing proxy struc­tures and has its limits in terms of numbers recruited. The fact that the Kremlin has persisted with such an approach shows that the domestic political risks of a partial or general mobilisation are considered higher. However, if personnel losses continue to rise and/or the Kremlin wants to pre-empt the impact of Western arms deliveries and security assurances by launching a new major offensive or create a favourable start­ing position for negotiations in the wake of the US elections, a new round of compulsory mobilisation can hardly be avoided – even though the new defence minister has denounced such a step.

Indeed, the necessary legislative and ad­ministrative steps have already been taken in parallel with the covert mobilisation. In July 2023, Putin ordered the upper age limit for reservists to be raised by five years; and starting from January 2024, men between the ages of 18 and 30 – instead of between 18 and 27 as previously – are to be con­scripted, as are males in the newly occupied Ukrainian territories. As a result, the num­ber of conscripts drafted in spring 2024 reached 150,000, the highest level since 2016.

At the same time, it is becoming more difficult for Russian men to evade conscription as either draftees or mobiki. Since April 2023, conscription notices no longer have to be handed over in person; a digital notifi­cation is now sufficient. The fines for fail­ing to appear at the enlistment offices on time have been massively increased, and there is also the threat of consequences that make everyday life much more difficult – such as having a driving licence revoked or not being allowed to apply for a loan. Fur­thermore, once a call-up notice has gone out, the recipient is no longer permitted to leave the country.

However, a new round of compulsory mobilisation would be extremely unpopular. In a survey carried out by “Russian Fields” in October 2023, 58 per cent of re­spondents were against such a step. Even though the level of regime repression is extremely high, the potential for discontent could exceed even that in September 2022. This is because those who have so far delib­erately escaped the massive recruitment campaigns, including well-educated resi­dents of the largest cities, would now be forced to fight at the frontline. The earlier approach of keeping the group of mobiki isolated and therefore easier to control would no longer be tenable. Furthermore, given the impact on larger segments of society, it is possible that the protest poten­tial among mothers or women would grow, not least as the new mobiki would be sent into battle insufficiently trained and ill equipped; indeed, the structural problem of a lack of both training facilities and junior officers to serve as instructors has not been solved. The “Put domoi” (The Way Home) movement, which was formed after the first round of mobilisation, initially criticised not the war itself but the lack of rotation of those who had been mobilised. When the authorities failed to respond to the com­plaints, criticism of the country’s leadership became more focused on more fundamen­tal political issues.

It can therefore be assumed that if the Kremlin were to call for a new round of mobilisation, the justification narratives would have been tweaked in advance. One option would be to postulate a massively increased level of threat posed, for example, by the Ukrainian shelling of Russian mili­tary facilities and/or by Western arms sup­plies. Or the new round of mobilisation could be framed as a question of fairness, as it would relieve those already serving as mobiki. Such an approach could dispel the main criticism made by “Put domoi” and portray the new call-up as a regular rota­tion under the still valid mobilisation decree of September 2022. While for some time now Moscow’s leadership has been pushing the narrative of the growing exter­nal threats to Russia, the thorny issue of fairness has not yet been directly addressed. Rather, Putin adopted a new tone in late February 2024 when he praised the front­line fighters and war veterans as the coun­try’s “new elite”.

Preparing for the long war

Russia is counting on a long war of attrition in which it will be able to draw on consid­erably more manpower reserves than Ukraine and the latter will increasingly run up against it limits following a general mobilisation that started at the beginning of the war almost two-and-a-half years ago. Alone the number of men aged 18 to 60 is more than three-and-a half-times higher in Russia (at 39 million) than in Ukraine (11 million). Against this backdrop, it is all the more essential that Kyiv obtain sufficient supplies of modern weapons and equipment as well as long-term security com­mit­ments from Western states.

At the same time, Russia is preparing for a lengthy confrontation with the West. Its defence budget has doubled to the equiva­lent of €108 billion in 2024 compared with the previous year. This means that 28 per cent of government expenditure is allocated to the military, which corresponds to 6 per cent of gross domestic product. Combined with classified expenditure in other budget items used for military purposes, the figure is higher than 7 per cent. The increased military expenditure is intended not only to boost Russian defence production but also to increase the size of the armed forces to 1.5 million soldiers. In 2024, 16 new divi­sions and 14 brigades are to be formed.

Meanwhile, more fundamental changes in the structure of the Russian armed forces are becoming apparent. The direction of travel is away from the 2008 reform, which was aimed at transforming the outdated mass mobilisation army of the Soviet era into a more professional and combat-ready force capable of pursuing the Russian quest for a zone of influence in the post-Soviet space and performing limited out-of-area operations. Now, the Russian armed forces are returning in part to the concept of the mass mobilisation army. In future, NATO and the EU will be confronted with a mili­tarised Russia whose armed forces have – despite all the problems – gained combat experience in a major war in Europe and increased their capacity to engage in such conflicts.