Putin’s war machine scours the home front for recruits

Moscow turns to raids, pressure and deception to enlist soldiers to fight against Ukraine

Russian army recruiters are resorting to increasingly coercive tactics, including snatching men off the street and tricking students into signing up, as Moscow’s manpower advantage in Ukraine comes under strain.

The pressure stems from Vladimir Putin’s refusal to adapt his war strategy built on Russia’s willingness to sacrifice more soldiers than Ukraine, even as western estimates put Moscow’s losses at more than 30,000 men a month.

“Year by year and month by month, it’s harder for the Russian army to find people,” said Grigory Sverdlin, director of Get Lost, a non-profit that helps Russian soldiers desert. “Putin is evidently putting off a new wave of mobilization, so the defence ministry has to put more pressure on all sorts of people to sign contracts.”

Still, Putin insists Russia’s advance is inexorable and Ukraine’s collapse is only a matter of time. Another mobilisation is “nonsense”, according to his stand-in, former president Dmitry Medvedev.

Military analysts say Putin’s sweeping territorial ambitions have spread Russian forces thin, yielding only incremental gains at heavy cost. New units are sent straight to the front to sustain slow-moving offensives rather than build reserves.

“The more the Russian military grew in size, the less of it they were able to employ on the battlefield at any given time,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The scale of Russian offensive action decreased as the size of the force deployed in Ukraine increased.”

Russia was also slow to adapt to Ukraine’s defensive tactics, sending its already high casualty rate even higher. Western governments estimate nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in action during the war; Ukraine claims to have killed 131,000 this year alone.

“They became complacent and failed to adapt,” Kofman said. “If they’re not able to increase this recruitment rate, or conduct mobilisation, Russian units will start to deplete again and that will leave them vulnerable. Not only will the offensive effort stall, but they will face significant reversals on the battlefield over time.”

Although Medvedev claims the army recruited 200,000 more men in the first half of 2026, high attrition has forced Russia to send most of them to replenish frontline units rather than build reserves.

That has left Russia stretched thin outside its main axis of attack in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Russia’s defence ministry claimed in July that its forces seized 2,226 sq km in the first half of the year. The Institute for the Study of War puts its net gain at just 81.1 sq km, after Ukrainian counter-attacks.

Recruiting enough men to sustain even the current slow pace of attack has become increasingly difficult. Although new soldiers receive bonuses of up to Rbs4.5mn ($56,000) for signing up, officials are under increased pressure to find recruits, according to analysts.

Get Lost’s Sverdlin said: “They replenish the losses with people who sign new contracts, and there haven’t been enough people willing to sign up for quite some time — even for the huge sums offered in the contracts.”

The Kremlin and defence ministry have ordered local officials to meet quotas for new recruits as part of this year’s 409,000 target, said people familiar with the matter. Russians can also receive referral bonuses for persuading others to sign up, spawning a cottage industry of remote headhunters who cold-call potential recruits.

The pressure has increased in recent months. Activists describe the efforts as an attempt to help Putin avoid another politically unpopular mobilisation drive — the first since autumn 2022, when hundreds of thousands of men fled the country.

Instead, officials are “trying to squeeze as much as they can from every category of men”, said Artyom Klyga, a military law expert at Connection e.V., a Germany-based group supporting conscientious objectors and deserters. “There are traps for each group to trick them or pressure them into signing a contract.”

In Penza, a city in southern Russia, police have raided workplaces and taken people off the street to military recruitment offices, where they have been forced to sign contracts, according to activists.

Similar sweeps have taken place in other cities, including Ulyanovsk, where a man who had lost an eye said he was forced to sign a contract, and Rostov, where police detained 35 factory workers.

Russian police denied the raids were aimed at sending people to the front.

A report from a district in Russia’s Belgorod region suggests many recruits enlist only after pressure, with officials approaching “suitable candidates” for “conversations” at their homes and workplaces, including debtors, recently discharged draftees and men serving suspended sentences.

In the far-eastern region of Khabarovsk, police said they held 2,500 such “conversations” last year and persuaded 32 people to sign up — all but four of them suspects in criminal investigations.

“Local authorities are under enormous pressure to recruit enough soldiers each year,” said Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, who compiled the reports. “They know who is in debt, who is under police investigation and who has recently lost their driving licence, and they home in on these men.”

Many others have been summoned to verify their military service records, including women with medical or other skills used by the armed forces. Starting in 2026, Russia gave local recruitment offices the power to issue such summonses year-round, a tool activists say is often used to pressure people into joining.

Indira, a real estate agent from Nalchik, told the FT that she and several former female classmates received draft notices in May because they have degrees in pharmacology. “The fact of receiving it is itself certainly very concerning, but there is no reason to worry just yet,” she said.

The notices have also been used to pressure political activists.

Roman Malozemov, 22, a lawyer from Novosibirsk who represents farmers suing the government over the culling of their cattle, said he received a draft notice on the same day a hearing was scheduled in the case. “I call it a jump-scare prank,” Malozemov told the FT.

The increase in coerced recruitment has coincided with a surge in desertions. At least 28,000 people have been convicted of fleeing their posts, according to rights organisation Peace Plea. Leaked internal documents indicate the real annual total is likely at least twice as high, according to Ukrainian analytical group Frontelligence Insight.

In private conversations and Telegram chats, Russians are increasingly voicing fears that a new mobilisation could follow September’s State Duma elections. Some are already checking flights abroad to avoid the last-minute price surge seen during the previous call-up, while others are considering leaving for several weeks before the vote as a precaution.

“I have no clue whether they will announce mobilisation or not. But everyone just has a feeling that something is about to happen after the elections,” said Yaroslav, a manager from Moscow.

But another mobilisation would carry at least as much risk for Russia as reward, said a person close to the defence ministry. “The political effect of major losses among mobilised men, combined with likely significant desertion, could be very negative domestically.”