‘Full-scale war on the horizon’: new laws could add up to 5 million soldiers to Russia’s army

What’s сhanged

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What hasn’t changed

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Why the new legislation?

The bill’s authors claim that around 80,000 Russians age out of the mandatory conscription window without having actually done any military service, and that of these, “around 30,000” have no legal exemption.

The number of draft dodgers has increased since the invasion of Ukraine. As Novaya Gazeta Europe reported in October, the number of lawsuits challenging conscription also rose sharply last year. Enlistment offices fell far short of their quotas in 2022: of the 134,500 men who were called up, a third ultimately evaded the draft.

Human rights activists believe that the raising of the age limit is an attempt to “re-conscript” those who avoided mobilisation. The Russian army is in dire need of more personnel, military researcher Kirill Mikhailov told Novaya Gazeta Europe. It needs many more men even just to “adequately defend [the] areas [it already holds],” he said, recalling what happened in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine in 2022, when the Russian army was defeated “because it simply did not have enough troops”.

Meanwhile, raising the age limit for the reserves means that 4.8 million additional Russians will be eligible for mobilisation, returning the country’s reserve — in theory — to numbers it hasn’t seen in 17 years. This figure does not include men who have legitimate exemptions from mobilisation.

The country’s reserve has been shrinking since 1985, data from the Russian Monitor of Economics and Health of the Population show. The recruitment problems stem in large part from the demographic dip of the 1990s, when Russia’s birth rate plummeted, but this doesn’t explain the trend entirely. In 1989, when Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan, more than 80% of Russian 18-year-olds had already served in the army. By 1998, that percentage had fallen to 50% — and then to 40% in 2007 and 20% in 2012, when data was last collected.

For the last 30 years, contract soldiers have gradually been replacing conscripts in the Russian army. As early as 1996, then president of Russia Boris Yeltsin signed a decree promising that the complete transition from a conscription to a contract system would be complete by 2000. The 1998 economic crisis thwarted this plan, but the intention remained. As recently as 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that conscription was “gradually becoming a thing of the past.”

In 2014, professional soldiers in the Russian army outnumbered conscripts for the first time, the Defence Ministry reported.

But these days, plans to abolish conscription seem to have lost their appeal. Russian line formations — mostly infantry — must be staffed with professional soldiers and conscripts at a ratio of two to one, Mikhailov explained, so any increase in the number of professional soldiers requires an uptick in conscripts too. Last year, the number of professional soldiers in the army grew by 137,000.

Most likely, Mikhailov said, the Russian army is planning to grow in several ways: by expanding conscription, doubling down on recruitment efforts, compelling paramilitary formations to sign contracts with the Defence Ministry, and implementing further waves of mobilisation.

Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu regularly makes announcements about the military’s growing number of personnel and has estimated the army signs 1,336 new recruits each day. But the relatively small number of professional soldiers in the Russian army remains a problem. “There’s been progress”, Mikhailov said, “just not enough to win the war in Ukraine. Now officials are resorting to desperate measures”.