A Real Mobilization to Follow Putin’s Bogus Election?

Now that Vladimir Putin has secured reelection in an unfair and unfree election, and killed off his primary political rival, Alexey Navalny, he faces a serious dilemma. How can he maintain a field force of around 200,000 men to wage aggressive war against Ukraine when his spendthrift generals launch offensives that can cost 1,000 dead and wounded every day?

Russian ground forces in Ukraine have become a hodge-podge of regular units whose ranks have been topped up by mobilized soldiers, and those who signed contracts for military service to manage their family debts. Convicts and irregular volunteer formations under the umbrella of the Ministry of Defense make up the balance. 

I estimate that there are 150,000-200,000 men in Russian-occupied Ukraine, including support units, based on the available data and the history of modern warfare.

Nevertheless, if the loss rate remains at last year’s levels, the Kremlin leadership will have to decide on how to get more manpower. Each of the five options comes with a practical problem or a political price.

• Recruit 20,000–30,000 soldiers a month during 2024, despite the inevitable deficit of convicts (now largely dead or wounded) who formed a crucial element of recruits in 2023;
• decrease losses through negotiations;
• use an “escalation-for-de-escalation” approach in the Baltic region, with the aim of forcing negotiations;
• send conscripted soldiers currently excluded from the war to the front; and
• begin another wave of mobilization.

The last is also the final option — mobilization was highly unpopular among Russian society in 2022 and will be avoided unless the Kremlin believes other efforts are not producing results. It will be clear by the summer if the Russian leadership has been forced down this route. The fourth alternative — sending young conscripts — would break Putin’s promise not to, although it remains possible.

Why are so few troops available? After all, the personnel ceiling of the Russian armed forces was raised to 1,320,000 in December from a level of 1,150,628 at the start of the year. 

According to recent official statements, about 490,000 contracted soldiers and volunteers were recruited for military service in 2023, along with 244,000 mobilized soldiers.

While Vladimir Putin has said that there are “more than 600,000 people in the combat zone”, it is highly likely that “people” include the civilian Russian population, including civil personnel and so on. 

First of all, it is necessary to figure out what all the officially declared current Russian troop numbers can be compared to. For example, the peak level of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan was about 109,000 troops including 106,000 Soviet military. Among this number, about 74,000 military servicemen belonged to combat units (about 70%.) 

Next, there is a need to estimate the current military composition. 

Kontraktniki, or contract soldiers, total an estimated 490,000 men, including about 50,000 warrant officers serving for two or more years. But there are many unknowns; for example, whether 40,000-50,000 military students are included in the total, how many were forced to extend their contracts by the government, and how many have been killed or wounded.

It is known that contracted soldiers include prisoners. They were recruited during 2023 into the “Storm Z” and “Storm V” units and their total number probably exceeds 100,000. For comparison, the Wagner group recruited 50,000 prisoners during June–December of 2022 (many are dead and the rest have been subsumed into official units.)

The total number of prisoners in Russia was 466,000 in January 2021, of which 40,000–45,000 were female. This number fell dramatically to 266,000 by October, with a large but unknown proportion accepting military service. In addition, there were 20,000 or more volunteer servicemen in units run by the Ministry of Defense.

There is also some double counting among the kontraktniki numbers. Both prisoners and volunteers were obliged to sign follow-up contracts after six months or were automatically re-enrolled after a few months, meaning that some counted twice as contracted soldiers during 2023. 

Altogether, I estimate that there are 200,000 contracted soldiers, sergeants, and warrant officers, who were already in the armed forces, along with at least several tens of thousands of prisoners and tens of thousands of volunteers. All told we get 300,000–350,000 of the declared total of 490,000 contracted soldiers actually serving.

What about losses? These are conservatively assessed by US and British intelligence as 315,000–320,000 killed and wounded soldiers and mercenaries at the end of 2023 compared to more than 100,000 at the end of 2022. 

The total number of Russian armed forces personnel was only about 750,000 on the eve of 2022, some 20,000 lower than the 770,000 in 2016–2017 because of negative demographic trends. 

Therefore all the recruiting efforts of 2023 together with partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 allowed Russia to restore the quantity of the armed forces, but not the quality. Casualties mean the Russian ground army significantly deteriorated in terms of organizational integrity and training. 

To both fight the war and a permanent insurgency in Ukraine requires more troops, and yet the Russian armed forces are visibly stretched. 

In June 2023, during the Wagner group mutiny, it was clear that there was no significant concentration of reserve troops in the Russian regions close to Ukraine’s borders except for some combat support units and, of course, air bases and other military branches. Almost all Russian combat-capable and combat-support troops are deployed in occupied Ukraine.

So, what now?

Russia’s political leadership needs to find new manpower. This decision will depend on a number of factors. 

Firstly, if average losses remain the same as in 2023, Russia needs to recruit at least 20,000 new soldiers/volunteers a month. If however, it seeks to conduct more offensive operations using the same bloody approach as at Avdiivka, that number rises to about 30,000 a month.

This will not be easy. There are significant manufacturing plants in Russian prisons and these require a workforce. That means the army will not be able to recruit the same numbers as it did in 2023. Once that source is reduced, the ability to recruit sufficient “cannon fodder” looks harder.

Secondly, Russia would welcome a temporary respite from the war, or at least decrease its intensity through negotiations. In February, Putin twice discussed his negotiating conditions, throwing in another bout of nuclear blackmail for good measure. Any pause would allow a restructuring and restoration of military vitality, and reduce the recruitment crisis. 

Thirdly, there is the seemingly simple option of sending conscripts, who officially don’t participate.

Last year, 277,000 Russian males were conscripted for one year. Some have signed contracts, and there will be new spring and fall conscription campaigns this year. They remain in Russia only at the Kremlin’s discretion. Conscripts can be legally sent to the battlefield after just four months of military service.

Moreover, the expansion of the Southern military district to include the occupied territories of Ukraine from March 1 means that conscripts can easily be relocated to any part of the district without public attention. The same is true towards the re-establishment of the Leningrad military district, which would be the launching point for any military action in the Baltic region. Considering Russia’s paradoxical belief in “escalation-for-de-escalation”, the prospect of a direct clash with NATO should not be underestimated.

Such aggression could use conscripts even without a massive mobilization, at least at first. It is true the conscripts are poorly trained, but so are the mobilized soldiers and prisoners; conscripts are also younger, which is a significant advantage.

This though would not be the Russian military leadership’s favored approach. It prefers to pressure conscripts to become contracted soldiers. Expect such pressure to increase in 2024.

Even so, this may not ultimately be enough to provide the necessary manpower. If the numbers don’t stack up by the summer, and/or combat losses are higher than expected, the Kremlin will have few options, even though it lacks junior officers and non-commissioned officers to train and command the new recruits. 

None of this should surprise or change the calculations of Ukraine’s Western supporters. Russia cannot be negotiated with or appeased. The Russian threat to Ukraine and to the West can only be eliminated by military power.

Dr. Pavel Luzin is a non-resident senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University.) In 2017–2018, he was a consultant on the issues of the armed forces, law enforcement agencies, and the defense industry for Alexey Navalny’s presidential campaign in Russia. 

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.