Russia is reportedly adopting increasingly aggressive strategies to recruit fresh troops for its war in Ukraine, as President Vladimir Putin looks to make up for heavy battlefield losses. Men are being snatched off Russian streets and students are being offered significant financial incentives to join drone units, as Moscow looks to avoid another forced mobilisation. Local officials have been issued recruitment quotas by the Kremlin and Moscow’s defence ministry, as it looks to meet this year’s 409,000 target.
Russians are being given referral bonuses for encouraging others to sign up, while officials are exploiting knowledge of potential recruits’ debts and legal problems to pressure them into signing up. The Russian army has suffered 1.4 million casualties, including 450,000 deaths, since its invasion began in February 2022. According to Ukrainian estimates, Russian recruitment rates are not keeping up with casualty rates, with 222,500 troops lost, including 131,000 killed, but only 221,000 recruited so far in 2026. “Year by year and month by month, it’s harder for the Russian army to find people,” Grigory Sverdlin, director of a charity helping Russian troops desert called Get Lost, told the Financial Times. “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.” Human rights campaigners say police have raided workplaces and snatched people off the street to take them to military recruitment offices, where they were forced to sign contracts.
Raids in Russian cities and towns like Penza, Kamenka and Kuznetsk have seen men being rounded up by police officers and other military enlistment officials. “In Penza, they’re taking everyone indiscriminately, stopping cars and public transport, rounding up men and taking them away to sign contracts. Raids are happening across the entire city,” one local resident told human rights group Idite Lesom, according to Ukrainska Pravda. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that the Kremlin is preparing to carry out a “significant” wave of involuntary reserve call ups this autumn.
The Institute for the Study of War reports that Russia has been preparing conditions to conduct rolling partial reserve call-ups since October last year, and has passed bills to expand the pool of criminals who may be recruited. Targeting sign ups from students also suggests that Moscow is keen to pour more skilled human resources into its drone forces which - like those of Ukraine - are playing an increasingly vital role in the war. Drone operators typically work some distance from the front line, but they are regarded as high-value targets who are hunted down and killed if their positions are revealed.
