Russia's troop replenishment crisis

Wednesday 28 January 2026

Russia’s troop replenishment crisis is not a mystery of arithmetic. She has men of military age. She has a vast internal security apparatus. She has learnt, since February 2022, how to turn parts of her economy into an engine for ammunition and drones. Yet she struggles to turn population into combat power at the rate her war now consumes it. The constraint is not merely bodies. It is trained bodies, led bodies, rotated bodies and bodies that can be risked without causing domestic political shock.

That is what the replenishment crisis means in practice: Russia’s ability to keep units in the line is increasingly dependent on a set of coercive financial and legal mechanisms that buy time and avoid the one decision the Kremlin fears most: a second large, open mobilisation.

The crisis has three layers.

First, attrition. Russia’s operational method has leaned heavily on assault tactics that trade lives for metres. Western and Ukrainian estimates differ in detail, but the central point is widely accepted: Russian casualties have been very high over a long period, and the need to replace losses is continuous rather than episodic. Even a state as large as Russia cannot do that indefinitely without degrading quality or changing policy. A US Congressional Research Service summary of Russia’s military performance notes significant personnel losses and a reliance on tactics associated with high casualty rates. 

Secondly, reserves and rotation. A healthy force does not simply replace the fallen. It builds strategic reserves, rests formations, retrains leaders and cycles units so that combat effectiveness does not collapse. Recent assessments linked to the Institute for the Study of War argue that Russia is unable to form a strategic reserve and is therefore likely to advance slowly and at high cost, because she is consuming manpower as quickly as she generates it. 

Thirdly, politics. The Kremlin remembers September 2022. A “partial mobilisation” aimed at roughly 300,000 men produced panic and flight, and it branded the war, in the public mind, as personal and inescapable. Russian leaders have therefore attempted to make the war feel voluntary, distant and economically rewarding, even as the front demands more and more.

From this dilemma comes Russia’s modern replenishment system. It is a patchwork, but a deliberate one.

Financial inducements as force generation

The centrepiece is contract recruitment. The Kremlin frames service as a job, not a summons. The pay is pitched to outbid civilian wages, especially in poorer regions, and it is topped up by one-time sign-on bonuses that have become a tool of regional competition.

Reporting in January 2026 described multiple regions sharply raising contract bonuses after briefly cutting them, an indication that budgets are strained but the manpower requirement is non-negotiable. In some regions, restored payments reached several million rubles when federal and regional bonuses are combined. 

The logic is straightforward. If Moscow can buy enough volunteers, she can postpone mobilisation. The cost is also straightforward. These bonuses are not a marginal expense. They pull labour from the civilian economy, raise wage expectations, and create a form of war inflation in which the state must keep bidding against itself to maintain intake. Even where recruitment targets are met on paper, the price per recruit rises over time because the pool of willing men shrinks.

Legal captivity: turning contracts into a one way door

Financial incentives alone do not solve the retention problem. Russia has therefore relied upon law to keep signed bodies from becoming demobilised bodies.

After the 2022 mobilisation, a presidential decree effectively made military contracts open-ended, limiting the ability of soldiers to leave service except in narrow circumstances such as age limits or incapacity. The Associated Press summarised this dynamic plainly: contracts that appear time-limited are extended indefinitely under the mobilisation decree’s continuing effect. 

This matters because it converts recruitment into retention. Every man who signs is, in effect, “held” for as long as the state declares the mobilisation framework to remain in force. It also shifts risk onto the individual recruit: he can believe he has bought a year of danger for a house deposit, only to discover he has bought an indefinite term.

Conscription as a feeder system, not an admission

Russia continues to run regular conscription cycles, officially separate from the war. Yet conscription supports replenishment indirectly.

One method is numerical. Moscow has raised draft targets over time. For example, Russia’s spring 2025 draft was set at 160,000, up from earlier years, alongside the stated ambition to expand the armed forces. 

Another method is behavioural. Conscripts are supposed not to be sent to Ukraine. Yet rights groups and media reports have repeatedly described pressure on conscripts to sign contracts, thereby converting them from protected draftees into deployable contract soldiers. The AP reports this coercion directly, noting claims that conscripts are pressured by superiors into contract service. 

In this model, conscription creates a captive pool of young men already inside the military system, already subject to hierarchy and intimidation, who can be pushed towards “voluntary” contracts.

Prison recruitment and the industrialisation of expendability

If contract soldiers are the respectable face of replenishment, penal recruitment is the brutal back room.

Wagner pioneered mass prisoner recruitment, but the Defence Ministry institutionalised it. Russia has expanded eligibility over time, including by permitting the recruitment of prisoners in pre-trial detention and even criminal suspects. The Associated Press notes that laws now allow recruitment of both convicts and suspects in criminal cases. A detailed Meduza report described legal changes enabling suspects to join the army at essentially any stage of criminal proceedings, which also affects the incentives of defendants and the safety of victims. 

The military value of prisoner recruits is not subtle. They can be used in high risk assault roles, they are socially marginal, their deaths carry less political cost, and their survival can be marketed as redemption. The strategic cost is equally clear. This practice corrodes military professionalism and deepens the state’s dependence on coercion. It also signals that Russia’s manpower problem is not occasional. She is recruiting from social categories a state uses only when normal recruitment is insufficient.

Foreigners, migrants and citizenship as a recruiting currency

A further layer is foreign recruitment, ranging from opportunistic enlistment to coercive pressure on migrants inside Russia.

The Kremlin has offered accelerated citizenship for foreign enlistees, and recruitment efforts have targeted foreign workers and new citizens. The AP reports that raids in migrant communities have been used to pressure men into military service, and that Russia has adopted measures linking residency pathways to service. 

In November 2025, a little-advertised decree was reported to require many foreign men seeking residency or citizenship to sign a military or emergency services contract, an approach that mixes migration policy with force generation. 

There is also deception. The AP describes cases of foreigners lured by promises of employment and then duped into signing military contracts, with examples involving multiple nationalities. This is recruitment by fraud, and it has two advantages for the Kremlin: it increases intake while exporting some political fallout to foreign governments and to marginal communities within Russia.

Expanding the armed forces on paper

Alongside these methods is an ambition to increase the size of the armed forces as a structural matter. In September 2024, Vladimir Putin ordered the army’s size to rise to 1.5 million active servicemen, increasing the overall authorised strength. 

This is partly signalling, aimed at persuading Russians and foreigners that Russia is built for a long war. It is also an administrative move: authorised strength drives budgets, unit structures and recruitment targets. Yet the decree also exposes the underlying problem. Announcing a larger army is easy. Building it, in a state already bleeding experienced junior leaders and non-commissioned officers, is much harder.

Why this is a crisis rather than a system

One might argue that Russia’s measures show adaptation, not crisis. She is, after all, still fighting. That misses the point. The crisis is that Russia’s system is increasingly expensive, increasingly coercive and increasingly low-quality, precisely because it is designed to avoid the political cost of mobilisation.

A replenishment model that depends on ever larger cash payments will strain budgets and distort labour markets. A model that depends on legal captivity will breed resentment and desertion pressures. A model that depends on prisoners and coerced migrants will degrade cohesion and competence. And a model that cannot build reserves will struggle to convert tactical pressure into operational breakthrough, because every success must be bought again next week with new bodies.

This is why, even as Russia claims large numbers of troops in theatre and large annual recruitment totals, credible analysts still speak of limits: limits on reserves, limits on tempo and limits on sustainable losses. 

What to watch next

If Russia’s troop replenishment crisis deepens, the measures will likely intensify along three tracks.

One is money: higher bonuses, more regional competition, and more benefits such as debt relief and housing incentives. The second is compulsion dressed as choice: greater pressure on conscripts to contract, and tighter enforcement against refusal. The third is externalisation: more foreign recruitment, more migration-linked service requirements, and perhaps more reliance on non-Russian formations in rear or support roles to free Russian infantry for the front.

The variable that could break this pattern is a second overt mobilisation. The Kremlin has avoided it because it would admit, to Russia’s public, that the war is not a limited expedition but a national ordeal. Yet every month of high attrition makes that admission more likely.

For Ukraine and her partners, the implication is grim but clear. Russia’s manpower is not infinite, but her willingness to convert society into a recruitment pool is high. The war, in other words, is becoming a contest between Ukraine’s ability to impose losses efficiently and Russia’s ability to replace those losses without shattering her domestic bargain.

In that contest, Russia’s replenishment measures are not merely military instruments. They are a map of the Kremlin’s fear: fear of saying, openly, what her recruitment system already reveals, namely that the war is consuming men faster than politics comfortably allows her to replace them.