How Russia keeps raising an army to replace its dead

编者：如果民主不能战胜专制，民主又有什么意义呢？

For Russian men, war now advertises itself like any other job.

Offers for front-line contracts appear on the messaging app Telegram alongside group chats and news alerts, promising signing bonuses of up to $50,000 — life-changing money in a country where average monthly wages remain below $1,000. The incentives go beyond cash, with pledges of debt relief and free childcare for soldiers’ families and guaranteed university places for their children. Criminal records, illness and even HIV are no longer automatic disqualifiers. For many men with little to lose, the front has become an employer of last resort.

Behind the flood of offers is a coordinated recruitment system run through Russia’s more than 80 regional governments. Pressured by the Kremlin to deliver manpower, the regions have become de-facto hiring hubs, competing with one another for contract soldiers. What began as a wartime fix has hardened into a quasi-commercial headhunting industry powered by federal bonuses and local budgets. Regional authorities contract HR agencies, which in turn deploy freelance recruiters to advertise online, screen applicants and shepherd men through enlistment paperwork.

Any Russian citizen can now work as a wartime recruiter, with many operating as freelance headhunters who earn commissions for delivering bodies to the front. Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO, reviewed recruitment channels across Russia and interviewed multiple recruits and recruiters for this report.

This labor defense market is being closely studied in Western capitals, where the continued growth of Russia’s army — despite having around 1 million soldiers killed or severely wounded since 2022 — has stunned intelligence services and vexed diplomats, who see the increase as crucial to understanding the country’s posture in peace negotiations and the possibility of future expansion into neighboring territory.

“Assuming that Putin is able to continue to fund the enormous enlistment bonuses (and death payments, too) and to find the manpower currently enticed to serve,” former CIA Director David Petraeus told POLITICO, Russia “can sustain the kind of costly, grinding campaign that has characterized the fighting in Ukraine since the last major achievements on either side in the second year of the war.”

Russia’s ability to sustain manpower levels amid massive battlefield losses helps explain why, four years into the invasion, Vladimir Putin appears more convinced than ever that he can force Ukraine to accept his terms — whether through diplomacy or a grinding war of attrition. Speaking to Russian journalists last week, Putin made clear the war would end only if Ukrainian forces withdrew from the territories Russia claims — otherwise, he warned, Moscow would impose its terms “by armed force.”

A Marketplace for Soldiers

When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Olga and her husband Alexander were running a small hiring operation in Moscow — placing construction workers, security guards and couriers in civilian jobs. About 18 months ago, they pivoted to something far more lucrative via Russia’s main classified ads platform: recruiting riflemen, drone operators and other soldiers for the war.

“Our daughter saw a job ad on Avito looking for recruiters, and that’s how it all started,” Olga told POLITICO in a series of voice messages over WhatsApp. Her profile picture displays the Russian coat of arms. (Olga and Alexander’s surname has been withheld to protect their anonymity under fear of governmental reprisal.)

As what it once expected to be a blitz has become a war of exhaustion, the Kremlin has reengineered its mobilization accordingly. In September 2022, Putin announced what he called a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 reservists, triggering a surge of public anger and emigration as hundreds of thousands fled the country to avoid being sent to fight. At the same time, the state opened its prison gates to the battlefield, luring inmates into uniform with promises of clemency and pay.

The approach worked, establishing a new blueprint: less coercion, more cash. To bring in volunteers who would not qualify for the draft because of age, health or lack of prior military service, the Kremlin targeted society’s most vulnerable — from prisoners to migrant workers and indebted men — by raising wages, offering lavish signing bonuses and selling military service as a path to dignity and survival. In September 2024, Putin formalized the strategy by ordering that the armed forces grow to 1.5 million active-duty troops. The sales pitch changed, too: subpoenas and summonses were replaced by money, benefits and appeals to manhood.

“These measures target a specific demographic: socially vulnerable men,” says political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, who studies Russian government decision-making as a lecturer at the Osteuropa Institute in Berlin. “Men with debts, criminal records, little financial literacy — or those trapped by predatory microcredit. People on the margins, with no prospects.”

For several months, Alexander and Olga worked for a company they found through Avito before going independent and growing their business. “Now recruiters work for us — 10 people,” Olga said.

The couple do most of their headhunting on the messaging app Telegram, across a vast ecosystem of channels now devoted to wartime hiring. In one group with more than 96,000 subscribers and a profile picture labeled “WORKING,” as many as 40 recruitment ads are posted per day, advertising openings for infantrymen and drone pilots alongside detailed bonus offers from rival regions.

Each post is essentially a wage bid. While wages remain generally constant, the regions typically compete for workers by bidding up the value of labor through incentives like signing bonuses. While the Kremlin last year introduced a minimum bonus benchmark of 400,000 rubles ($5,170) via presidential decree, the amounts on offer now fluctuate wildly. Recruiters steer applicants to whichever territory is currently paying best.

“We help with documents and put them in touch with regional officials,” Olga explained. “And then we pray — that they come back alive and well.”

The couple declined to say how much they earn per recruit. But, as with bonuses offered to volunteers, recruiter pay appears to vary widely by region. Another recruiter who spoke to POLITICO confirmed figures previously published by the independent Russian outlet Verstka, which put commissions at between $1,280 and $3,800 per signed contract.

Russian regions are tapping reserve funds to maintain recruitment levels. According to a review by independent outlet iStories, just 11 regions had budgeted at least $25.5 million on recruiter payments — amounts comparable to regional spending on health care and social services.

An analysis by economist Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, based on data from 37 regions, shows that average signing bonuses have now climbed to roughly $25,850, including federal payments. In early 2025, increased incentives triggered a surge of volunteers. In places like Samara, bonuses rose to more than $50,000 in summer, enough to buy a two-bedroom apartment. (In some regions, bonuses have recently fallen, which likely indicates they successfully recruited an above-average number of volunteers and had already met their quotas.)

For many families, military service has become one of the few routes to upward mobility. In many regions, weak local labor markets leave few alternatives. The more precarious the economic outlook, the stronger the recruitment pipeline.

“This kind of money can completely transform a Russian family’s life,” said Kluge. “The program works surprisingly well, but it has become far more expensive for the Kremlin.”

How the War Was Staffed

This recruiting machine helps to bring roughly 30,000 volunteers into the Russian armed services each month, enough to offset its heavy casualty rate and sustain long-term operations. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this summer that Russia had lost about 1 million killed and wounded — in line with estimates from British and Ukrainian officials.

Moscow is not relying solely on volunteers to fill its ranks. A law signed several weeks ago shifts Russia’s conscription system — which drafts medically fit men aged 18 to 30 not yet serving in the reserve — from biannual cycles to year-round processing. Experts say the change effectively creates a permanent recruitment infrastructure, enabling the Defense Ministry to funnel more people into the armed forces.

“They are moving forward, but they don’t care about the number of people they lose,” said Andriy Yermak, who as head of the Ukrainian Presidential Office served as the country’s leading peace negotiator before resigning Friday amid a corruption investigation. “It’s important to understand that we are a democratic country, and we are fighting against an autocratic one. In Russia, a person’s life costs nothing.”

Ukrainian units, by contrast, are stretched thin; in many places, they can barely hold the line. Ukrainian officers told POLITICO that in parts of the eastern front, there are as many as seven Russian soldiers for every one of theirs. This dynamic has been exacerbated by tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who, over the past year, have left their posts without authorization or abandoned military service altogether.

Russia’s personnel advantage is one reason its army now seizes Ukrainian land every month roughly equivalent in size to the city of Atlanta. As Kyiv relinquishes territory, it has worked to expand foreign recruitment, drawing volunteers from across the Americas and Europe.

German security officials say Putin is well-positioned to hit a declared target of a 1.5 million–troop army next year. That rapid industrial and military build-up has rattled European policymakers, who increasingly see it as preparation for military action beyond Ukraine.

“Russia is continuing to build up its army and is mobilizing on a scale that suggests a larger military confrontation with additional European states,” says German Bundestag member Roderich Kiesewetter, a security expert from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party.

A Fighter by Necessity

Anton didn’t join the military because he believed in the war. He slipped into the army after a financial collapse. By the time the 44-year-old father of three from the Moscow region walked into a military recruitment office last year, he felt he had run out of options. He was unemployed, drowning in debt and facing a possible prison sentence over a fraud case that made finding legal work nearly impossible. (Anton’s name was changed to protect his anonymity under fear of governmental reprisal.)

Opening Telegram, he also kept seeing persistent ads promising lavish bonuses. “My wife was on maternity leave, my mother is retired — the family depended on me,” Anton told POLITICO in voice messages sent over Telegram. “During one argument, my wife said: ‘It would be better if you went to war.’ A month and a half later, I signed the contract. It felt like the only way out.” In Anton’s case, no recruiter was involved — he went to the recruitment center on his own.

The contract promised Anton about $2,650 a month, plus a signing bonus from the Moscow region of roughly $2,460, more than 10 times what he had earned under the table as a warehouse worker and courier. He was dispatched to the Pokrovsk sector in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, at a remove from direct combat — though, as he puts it, under “occasional shelling” — keeping his unit’s drones operational.

There, said Anton, he met many men who, like him, had been unable to make ends meet in civilian life. “Some are paying alimony, some were sent by creditors to work off their debts,” Anton said. “There’s no patriotic talk here — no ‘for victory’ or ‘for Putin.’ Nobody speaks like that. Everyone is tired. Everyone just wants to go home.”

In July 2025, Anton received a state decoration for his service, which may help clear his criminal record. “That was another reason I signed,” he said. “It was the only way to avoid prosecution — either die or earn a medal.”

Eluding prison time remains a strong motivator for many. A relative of a missing soldier from the Moscow region described how 28-year-old Ivan, a cook, was arrested for drug trafficking in 2025. “He signed the military service declaration in custody and asked the court to replace his sentence with service,” the relative said. Within a week, he was deployed to the front. Ivan disappeared in April after less than a month in combat. His wife and 1-year-old son have heard nothing since. (Ivan’s name was changed at the family’s request, for fear of retribution.)

While tens of thousands have enlisted from Russia’s wealthiest urban centers, according to official databases and analysts, most recruits come from Russia’s economically depressed regions, where life has long been defined by poverty, crime and alcoholism.

“For many men, this is the last opportunity to build a life that feels meaningful,” said Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Instead of dying as failures in their families’ eyes, they die as heroes on the front.”

For the men volunteering — often treated as expendable by their commanders — the war has become a high-risk lottery for a better life. Survival brings transformative earnings. Even severe injuries come with fixed payouts: roughly $12,000 for a broken finger and $36,000 for a shattered foot.

During brief trips closer to the front to deliver equipment, Anton says he was repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian drones. On one occasion, one exploded just meters from him. Even that narrow escape wasn’t enough to make him reconsider.

“My financial situation improved significantly. It may sound sad, but for me personally, signing the contract made my life better,” Anton says. “The hardest part is being far from my children. But even knowing that, I would do it all over again.”

Putin sends Trump’s messengers packing, with eyes on a geopolitical win

 Vladimir Putin does not want a deal, and the sweetness of being begged to entertain one is something the Russian president relishes. Five hours of US President Donald Trump’s envoy and son-in-law meeting with the Kremlin head seemed to yield little publicly. It is helpful to step back and view the world and the Russian invasion through his eyes.

It is a war Putin started, hoping he could in a matter of days put Russia back on the map as the pre-eminent military force in Europe, capable of decisive action after the embarrassing departure by the United States from its longest war in Afghanistan. His hope for a swift win morphed into an ugly war of attrition. For a while, strategic defeat loomed, with US and NATO aid to plucky, tiny Ukraine allowing Kyiv to achieve victories unthinkable a year earlier.

But then came the gift of the Trump second term and its wobbly sympathy (or admiration) for Putin, and desire for peace, almost at any cost. Putin faces no election; the only likely limit on his term is that of his natural lifespan.

When he hears Trump say Ukraine is not his war, that he doesn’t want to waste money on it, and just wants it to end, he hears frailty and disinterest from the world’s biggest military power. This is the chance the former KGB spy had likely never imagined history would afford him: the US begging Russia to make peace. And the longer the process continues, the better the outcome likely afforded Moscow.

Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov emerged from Tuesday’s talks referring to a 27-point plan and four other documents. These details were likely designed to irk Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had most recently referred to a 20-point plan and must have hoped they had oversight of the contents of the other three documents.

But the tail end of this diplomacy is occurring mostly in silence, with little reason for Zelensky to rejoice. His team will brief the Europeans and then meet the Americans again, and he is returning to Kyiv. Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for an immediate deal is now a mirage, and ahead looms an inhospitable desert.

Ukraine has endured nearly four years of Russian invasion, but also now nearly 11 months at the mercy of of Truth Social. The impact of this unpredictability is often lost, as Trump vacillates from imposing some of the toughest sanctions on Russia yet and mulling sending Tomahawks, to the next moment reciting Russian talking points and putting the greatest pressure on his European allies and Zelensky himself.

The damage done to Ukrainian morale cannot be underestimated, and when the history of this episode is written, it will likely focus on Ukraine’s valiant and remarkable resistance against a larger foe, followed by the drastic undermining of their sacrifice by a White House obsessed with televised micro-moments of pleasing or pressuring whichever world leader fell into Trump’s attention span.

Trump is correct to seek as quick an end to this war as possible.
But this stems from a fatal misreading of Putin and his goals. Putin is a pragmatist, who adapts to each new opportunity or setback, but he retains a wider overarching dream. And that is to reset the balance of global security, and undo the ascendance of the US to its decades-long hegemony.

Putin is not all-powerful, has catastrophically misread his own henchmen in just the past two years – as we saw with the failed Wagner revolt in 2023 – and is facing clear manpower and budgetary pressures at home too. But he faces no anti-corruption probes, mid-term elections, or successors waiting in the wings. He has reset the Russian industrial complex to a ferocious war footing, and arguably must have as serious a plan to demobilize a now frail, over-stretched nation. In many ways, a continued war is Putin’s best shot at a continued reign.

So where does this leave Trump’s peace process? Ushakov said elements of the proposed deal were acceptable, others harshly criticized. It appeared possible that Zelensky had privately toyed with the idea of land swaps prior to the Kremlin meeting – softening a red line of the war. Yet the exact nature of any concessions from Kyiv was a closely guarded secret, presumably to not box Zelensky in to a new starting point for future talks. Yet whatever sweeteners Witkoff attached to the deal, Putin sent the dish back.

This is the dynamic of the months ahead, and it is not overwhelmingly hard to understand Russia’s hand. Putin is winning militarily – slowly, but undeniably – and he sees a Ukraine weak with manpower and funding issues, and in the grip of a domestic political crisis that keeps resurfacing.
Zelensky is hobbled at home, power cuts and frontline casualties blighting morale, and the repeat agony of loss, diplomatic deceit and pressure, coupled with ebbing aid, lead so many to question where this story ends without a growing Russian win?

Trump wants a peace above all else, and has shown in recent months that pressuring his allies to make concessions is a reflexive move. This is logical if you are a real estate tycoon squeezing your subcontractors to improve terms for a possible purchaser. But Putin is not looking to buy a hotel. Trump is rather trying to persuade an armed squatter to leave a property that they have set fire to, simply to show they are a force in the neighborhood again. This is not the sort of deal Trump is used to. 

The fight and the slow win is the juice for Putin, and he sees more of both ahead. He can add to his delight the salacious sight of his opponent’s one-time main backer, the US, now beseeching him to make a deal, and using the US president’s son in law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff to do it. Moscow’s progress on the frontlines may be agonizingly and brutally slow, delivered at huge cost. But the wider spectacle is slowly becoming one of Putin’s geopolitical fever dreams, which likely puts a real, enduring peace far out of reach.

Confederates Weren’t Patriots, They Were Traitors

 There are over one thousand seven hundred monuments to the Confederacy in America today, from the four corners of the continental United States to most of the states in between, and including several of the former Union states. The Confederate flag is commonly found almost exclusively in many white homes and businesses, as stickers on cars and trucks, and even as part of the Mississippi state flag.

This is notable because America is the only nation today where those who fought a civil war against that nation are memorialized and even glorified with government approval and at the taxpayers’ expense. Those who support keeping Confederate monuments on public lands commonly make the argument that Confederates were Americans. Below is one such example of the argument:

The [Confederate] flag in dispute flew over the forces of the Confederate States of America, not the Confederate States of the South. The invocation of “America” in the name of the seceded nation was no accident, no casual holdover. It was deliberate. They were us and we were them — all Americans.

The founders of the Confederacy understood themselves as the real Americans, as those who had kept faith with the real American Constitution, as opposed to the compromise-laden failure enacted in 1789. They cast themselves as the true Americans, the true inheritors of the Revolutionary legacy of ordered liberty and political sovereignty. They were the champions of liberty, standing firm against the usurpations of the Northern hordes.

— Pittsburgh Post Gazette

The great majority of reactions to the preceding argument will be either positive or negative. Those who want to preserve the monuments and the display of the Confederate flag will agree, and those who want the monuments and flag off public grounds and off the taxpayers’ hands will disagree. Very few indeed will have held both opinions. I’m one of those who have.

As I’ve often written, I grew up in the very deepest of the Deep South, in the Mississippi Delta. The cemetery at the local Southern Baptist church holds the bones of my direct family line all the way back to 1870. I was steeped in southern culture which by its very nature includes the glorification of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. I sang loud-and-proud what was until 2016 the unofficial theme song of the Ole Miss Rebels, “Dixie.”

To most White people raised in the Deep South, that “Lost Cause” isn’t about slavery at all, but about their own freedom (yeah, ‘freedom’), being their own nation with their own laws and way of life, no matter the cost to others. Many of them identified strongly with William Wallace in the movie, Braveheart, for that very reason.

As a general rule, when in conflict with others, always try to bear in mind that the other person honestly believes himself or herself to be good and right. I’ve found it’s usually more effective in such discussions to acknowledge the other person’s earnestness and good intentions, for doing so tends to lead to more respectful and productive debate, even if you believe in your heart that the other person is as racist as the day is long.

This is called diplomacy, what Churchill pithily described as “the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”

Perhaps it might be beneficial to use the metaphor of a firearm. If the weapon itself is one’s desire to change the other person’s mind, and if diplomacy is the ability to aim, then historical fact and data that disprove rank assumption are the ammunition.

Here, then, is your ammo when it comes to discussions about Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag:

“The Confederates weren’t traitors — they were Americans!”
The response to this claim is the definition of treason which, as defined by Cornell Law School, refers to anyone who, owing allegiance to America, wages war against America. Every Confederate soldier was by definition committing treason. Are we then to have monuments to traitors, or fly their flag in places of honor?

“How could Confederate soldiers be traitors? The Confederacy had declared its own independence!”
The response here is even simpler: “Since when should a nation’s taxpayers pay for monuments to another country who waged war on that nation, much less fly the offending nation’s flag in places of honor?”

“The Civil War wasn’t about slavery — it was about states’ rights!” According to leaders during the Civil War, it was very much about slavery:

• Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in what has since been called his “Cornerstone Speech”: “[Slavery] was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
• Mississippi Articles of Secession: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world . . . There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
• President Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address: “All knew that [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war.”

“We know slavery was wrong, and the Confederacy was wrong. Those monuments and the flag are only there to educate us, to remind us of our past and our heritage.”
Actually, no. A spike in the number of monuments occurred during two distinct periods. The first coincided with the enactment of Jim Crow laws in 1877 and lasted through the end of World War II, with most situated on courthouses and government land. The second period began in the mid-1950s and lasted through the late 1960s. But two landmark events transpired concurrently: Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Apologists claim such were erected on school grounds to help educate children, but the fact that so many immediately followed the Brown decision invalidates such a claim.

In other words, the erection of the monuments was quite literally an effort to preserve white supremacy by providing grand-scale tributes in prominent locations to serve as physical reminders of white supremacy. Sadly, the building of such monuments has continued through the present day, with at least fifteen being built since 2010, two of which were on courthouse grounds.

“Why do you have to keep shoving slavery and Jim Crow in my face? I wasn’t even alive then!”
This is perhaps the most common retort, and is usually made in frustration or even anger. Diplomacy is key here.

• The proper response is to ask in return why they insist on reminding Blacks of the slavery and Jim Crow laws that were forced upon them. After all, that’s what those monuments and that flag were meant to do in the first place, to remind Blacks of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy.

Most White Confederate sympathizers in the Deep South believe in the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” ethos, but it’s more of a mythos. Southern hospitality is real, but the racist tyranny the Deep South imposed and still attempt to impose is just as real.

There are nations — Russia, China, and France come to mind — which still celebrate past tyrannies wherein so many of their own populations were killed or enslaved. But there are more nations —Italy, Uganda, Cambodia, Germany, and many others — that learned to not glorify tyranny, to not celebrate the grand-scale crimes against humanity of their respective pasts. Our nation’s history clearly shows that that we have thus far chosen the former example.

Fortunately, times change and societies change, and such choices can never be written in stone. Most Americans acknowledge slavery as this nation’s original sin and greatest crime against humanity, even without the added iniquity of a century of Jim Crow laws. We do not look wistfully back at the Japanese Internment or the Chinese Exclusion Act. We no longer see General Custer as a hero, but as someone who received richly-deserved comeuppance during the Native American genocide.

Why, then, does a significant portion of the American population to this day still lionize those who literally committed treason in order to preserve and perpetuate white supremacy? America has learned to reject the crimes, but has not yet learned to reject those who committed those crimes.

It’s long past time that our nation came to grips with the prejudice that to this day still poisons our national discourse. The Confederate flag and monuments to Confederate leaders need to be removed from public property. More importantly, the government needs to ensure that every schoolchild is shown that even by the laws of the time, those who fought for the Confederacy were not heroes, but traitors.

Yes, traitors.

And that those traitors fought to preserve their “right” to own men, women, and children as property, and to do with those slaves as they would, up to and including rape and murder. No, such men must not be lionized. Even Lee, as cruel and brutal as we now know him to have been, knew there should be no monuments to him, or to anyone of the Confederacy which had been defeated on the field of battle. When asked to attend a meeting concerning such monuments, Lee replied, as documented by New York Times:

I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.