Vladimir Putin may be about to make a risky move, but it could cost him the much-desired social peace that he has managed to maintain throughout almost four more years of war.
Russia lost 281,550 soldiers on the battlefield in Ukraine, including dead, wounded and missing, in just the first eight months of this year, according to a Russian report released by the Ukrainian secret services. These data make 2025 the deadliest year for Vladimir Putin’s war machine, but another number is beginning to worry the Kremlin, which may be forced to take an unpopular measure that could cost the regime social peace.
“Russia will have approximately 700,000 soldiers in Ukraine and the number of casualties exceeds one million. If these types of fatalities continue, it will continue to have an enormous burden on Russian society and will bring great erosion to Vladimir Putin and his political apparatus”, Lieutenant General Rafael Martins tells CNN Portugal.
According to the report, in just 243 days, 86,744 Russian military personnel were killed, 33,966 were missing and 158,529 were injured in combat. The data presented contradict the ratio between deaths and injuries, which generally approaches 1 death for every three injuries. The report states that due to the absence of a system for evacuating the injured, the death toll is unusually high.
“This indicates a low level of survival for the wounded, who are poorly trained in tactical medicine and are generally left without help after injury,” the document states.
These data point to an average of 35,193 casualties per month for the Russian side, which presents an existential dilemma for the Kremlin’s war effort, at a time when the Russian government is beginning to have difficulty finding the necessary number of soldiers to maintain the pace of operations on the front line. According to the think tank At the American defense Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Russia is recruiting an average of 31,600 military personnel per month for its war effort.
The difference between the number of new soldiers and losses on the battlefield is creating a negative balance of more than 3,500 soldiers per month, which could worsen over time. This reality is forcing Russia to increase contract signing bonuses to attract new recruits, with soldiers receiving a payment that can reach 3.2 million rubles (approximately 34,820 thousand euros), an amount eight times higher than the average annual salary.
“[Putin] pay them very well. A Russian soldier at the front earns ten times more than in Siberia and receives a bonus of tens of thousands of euros. This, for Russia, is a fortune. This guaranteed him complete social peace. These people are volunteers. For the rest of the population, they are there because they want to”, explains Francisco Pereira Coutinho, a specialist in international law, to CNN Portugal.
But not even the significant increase in payments seems to be having the desired effect. Employees of Russian recruitment services that pay the best benefits reported to the local press that they are unable to increase the number of recruits, not even with successive increases in financial incentives. According to them, this difficulty arises because almost all those who wanted to “make money from the war” have already volunteered. Furthermore, the number of volunteers with “advanced age” and chronic health problems is also growing.
With the financial model proving to be insufficient, the Kremlin turned to its communications machine. According to ISW, the Russian Ministry of Defense is using misleading advertisements to attract recruits. An example of this happened during the run-up to the Alaska summit, which brought together Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The authorities began to tell the population that the war was about to end and to take the opportunity to “receive millions before peace arrives”.
Other campaigns appear to focus on recruiting for back-office positions, such as drivers or technicians. Furthermore, there is a high increase in the use of terms such as “safe service”, “rear units” or “easy service” or away from the “front line”. But even this does not seem to have been enough to meet the enormous needs arising on the battlefield in Ukraine. In addition to counting on the support of North Korea and Cuba, Moscow has resorted to recruiting African and Middle Eastern citizens to address this shortage.
“Slumps in recruitment, such that Russia is unable to replace the losses, may in part force Russian President Vladimir Putin to choose between conducting an involuntary reserve mobilization, which Putin has shown great reluctance to order, or going to the negotiating table,” the ISW analysts write.
And the Kremlin appears to be leaning towards the first option. On Tuesday, the Russian parliament approved a bill allowing the president to mobilize reservists in peacetime. This measure allows Putin to bypass the legal obstacle of the invasion of Ukraine not being formally considered a war in Russia, but rather a “special military operation”.
The objective is to be able to activate the enormous Russian mobilization capacity, which has more than two million reservists, after Putin signed a decree to this effect in 2015. According to the chairman of the defense committee of the Russian parliament, Andrei Kartapolov, the legislation will allow the sending of reservists abroad, “including to the Ukrainian regions of Sumy and Kharkiv”.
According to the new legislation, citizens enrolled in the mobilization reserve can be called upon to carry out defense-related tasks during armed conflicts, anti-terrorism operations or when Russian forces are deployed abroad. The call of these men would depend on direct authorization from President Vladimir Putin.
“This law aims to be somewhat discreet, so as not to alarm Russian society. On the other hand, it also aims to reduce what is being spent on current combatants and also the recognition that this conflict is about to last or even escalate”, considers Lieutenant General Rafael Martins.
But if the Kremlin’s efforts to attract more recruits fail, Putin may even be forced to carry out a new round of mobilization, something the Russian president has resisted due to the measure’s unpopularity. In September 2022, when a Ukrainian counterattack in the Kharkiv region made the Kremlin fear a collapse of the front, Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. However, this decision led almost 300,000 Russians to flee the country, fearing new rounds of recruitment.
Still, Kiev fears the repercussions of this decision. In September, the enigmatic Ukrainian spy leader Kyrylo Budanov admitted that this decision could create a “serious threat” to Ukraine and that, although “painful” for Russia, the possibility was “realistic.”
“Putin made an absolutely brilliant move when recruiting volunteers. But there are limits and the limit is budgetary. Russia spent decades preparing for this war and entered the conflict with full coffers. Those coffers are no longer as they were. If the war continues for a long time, he may have to change his strategy, but this could cause him internal problems”, predicts Francisco Pereira Coutinho.
