According to Western analysts, Russia is losing more than 30,000 soldiers per month in Ukraine. Since Vladimir Putin does not want to give up his infamous “meat grinder” tactics, military recruitment officers are resorting to increasingly desperate methods to meet recruitment quotas, FT reported on Monday.
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400,000 soldiers needed
The Kremlin has set a goal to recruit more than 400,000 new soldiers this year and has set demanding quotas for local recruitment offices. Under such circumstances, recruitment officers feel pressure from the authorities and apply increasingly unfair methods, analysts and activists say.
According to FT, citing analysts, these measures range from psychological pressure to “catching men on the street and deceiving students into signing contracts.”
Pressuring Russians by various means
In Khabarovsk, in the country’s Far East, the police say they held more than 2,500 “conversations” with potential candidates last year and convinced 33 people to join the army – almost all of whom, except for four, were suspects in criminal cases, FT wrote.
“Local authorities are under huge pressure to recruit enough soldiers every year,” Janis Kluge, a Russia expert from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told FT. “They know who is in debt, who is under police investigation, and who recently lost their driver’s license, and they target these men specifically.”
Since this year, Moscow has authorized local offices to issue summonses to check military service records year-round – including women with medical or other skills needed by the armed forces. Activists say this is another tool to pressure people into agreeing to join the army.
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High desertion rate
The increase in the use of coercion as a recruitment method coincided not only with heavy battlefield losses but also with a sharp rise in desertion. According to the Russian legal defense group “Pryzyv k sovesti,” at least 28,000 soldiers have been convicted for abandoning their positions, although the Ukrainian analytical group “Frontelligence Insight” claims leaked documents show this number could be twice as high.
Military analysts agree that the combination of desertion and losses depletes resources and threatens the positions of Russia’s front lines. Meanwhile, the prospect of another general mobilization is unpopular among both citizens and politicians. The last mobilization, carried out in the fall of 2022, forced hundreds of thousands of draft-age men to flee the country.
However, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev claims that recruiting new forces is not a problem and stated that the army recruited 200,000 new soldiers in the first half of 2026.
Meanwhile, Russia’s slow offensive progress appears to have yielded few territorial gains. Although the Kremlin claims Russian forces captured 2,226 sq km of land in the first half of this year, the US military analytical center Institute for the Study of War (ISW) estimates this figure at just 81.1 sq km – taking into account Ukrainian counterattacks.
