There Are Growing Signs the Kremlin's Manpower Situation Is Desperate

The Kremlin has ordered the largest fall conscription in a decade and is said to be planning a 'mobilization,' which is a call-up mandating return to the military of those who have already served.

Both actions are seen as politically desperate and risky, driven by the abject failure of Russian forces to achieve any gains - again - during the past year's offensives and the massive casualties they have engendered. JL 

 
Roland Oliphant reports in The Telegraph:

Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the conscription of 135,000 men aged between 18 and 30 by the end of 2025, the largest autumn call-up for a decade. The Russians have consistently failed to achieve an operational breakthrough, and their summer offensive have fallen short of its goals. If and when Russian men who have already served are mobilized - start getting call-up papers - it will mean that Putin has been forced into a dangerous social experiment. If teenage conscripts start showing up on the battlefields of Donbas, it will suggest desperation.

It is the time of year when the evenings draw in, the leaves turn brown and Russian teenagers without the connections or money to procure a doctor’s note pack their bags for the army.

Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the conscription of 135,000 men aged between 18 and 30 by the end of 2025, the largest autumn call-up for nearly a decade.

Officially, Russia’s regular spring and autumn call-ups for the 12-month draft do not have anything to do with the war in Ukraine – Russian law and the Kremlin’s fear of mothers’ ire keep draftees safely on base inside the country during their national service, while the invasion is prosecuted by contract soldiers.

 

But the numbers still talk. Putin wants to increase the size of his military to 2.4 million, including 1.5 million active servicemen – a rise of 180,000 personnel by 2028. And this autumn’s conscription drive, combined with the 160,000 called up in the spring, means that 2025 will see the highest overall number of men drafted into national service since 2016.

Amid persistent rumours about a new round of “mobilisation” – the compulsory recruitment, usually of men who have previously completed their national service, to fight in the war – the question of manpower has never been so crucial.

So what are the numbers that matter, and what exactly do they tell us about the trajectory of the war?

 

Manpower and casualties

Both sides keep the real statistics secret. It is clear, however, that Russia has more infantry in the field than Ukraine, and a bigger population from which to replace losses. It is also suffering many more casualties.

Ukraine is thought to have around 900,000 men and women under arms, but only a proportion of them are available for combat at the front. The army, the main land component, is estimated to be 500,000 strong, according to The Military Balance, the annual catalogue of global military forces by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

 

Earlier this year, Maj Gen Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR), Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said that Russia had around 620,000 men in the field in Ukraine and planned to recruit 343,000 more contract soldiers in 2025, but might well exceed its target. In 2024, he said, Russia mustered 440,000, a 15 per cent overshoot of the original plan for 380,000.

So far, that seems enough to replace battlefield losses while maintaining a very slow rate of advance. In the first half of this year, 30,000 to 48,000 Russian troops were being killed, wounded or going missing per month, according to the Ukrainian general staff.

The rate of loss has fallen significantly since June, however. The Institute for the Study of War reported this month that, as well as supplying the front, the Kremlin is trying to build up a “strategic reserve” of more than 200,000 contract soldiers for future operations, suggesting that it is confident the sums are on its side.

So far, so good for the Russians. But superiority in numbers has not, so far, equalled victory. The Ukrainians have effectively used drones to compensate for their shortage of men. As a result, the Russians have consistently failed to achieve an operational breakthrough, and their summer offensive has so far fallen short of its main goals.

 

And there are signs that the recruitment drive is not sustainable. Because many Russians attracted by the offer of a generous salary to fight (in some instances thought to be up to 600 per cent higher than the national average wage, made even more lucrative by an average lump-sum signing-on bonus of around £6,000) have already joined up, authorities seem to be turning to other sources of manpower.

 

About 30 per cent of this year’s contract soldiers are thought to be from the “special contingent” – convicts or those coerced into signing up under the threat of criminal charges. In July, Putin loosened the rules for recruiting foreigners, another sign of strain.

The desertion rate, a big problem for Ukraine, is also increasing in the Russian army.

The mobilisation gamble

All that is fuelling the persistent speculation about another round of “mobilisation”, three years after Putin sent hundreds of thousands of reservists to the front line.

“One of the major considerations [for the Kremlin in 2026] will be: if the objective is to take all of Donetsk region, can Russia do that without a mobilisation? I think they might have to really increase their personnel numbers, at least the way they’re fighting now, which is very costly in terms of attrition,” says Rob Lee, a former US Marine officer who now studies the war.

 

And this is where things get interesting.

The use of conscripts in Russia’s wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s caused much unhappiness at home, particularly among soldiers’ mothers. The deployment of conscripts to Afghanistan in the 1980s – and their return in zinc coffins – is often thought to have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That’s why the Kremlin publicly apologised when a number of conscripts ended up in combat in the first weeks of the invasion of Ukraine.

At the time, the defence ministry said it had taken action to send all conscripts back to Russia. It claimed that it had been unaware that those fulfilling their national service had been sent to fight.

There have been plenty of reports since of draftees being pressured to sign contracts as combat soldiers when their national service ends, however.

For the same fear of public backlash, Putin resisted calls from military chiefs for mobilisation until the war turned against Russia in the autumn of 2022. He then called up 300,000 reservists, but has refused to order another round since.

 

Would the Russian public accept another round? For all its control of domestic politics and the media, the Kremlin is not keen to find out.

But if and when Russian men start getting call-up papers in the post, it will mean that Putin has been forced into a dangerous social experiment. If teenage conscripts start showing up on the battlefields of Donbas, it will suggest desperation.

 

Which is to say, the whole war may turn on what is politically acceptable inside Russia and inside Ukraine.

That is one reason that Ukraine has spent the past several weeks hammering Russian petrol supplies, and why Russia has used the past two winters to smash Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

This winter, the Ukrainians also have long-range strike capability.

If Russian civilians find themselves without electricity or central heating in the middle of December, January and especially February – the Russian winter is always most miserable at the end – will their morale hold up as well as that of freezing Ukrainians?