Desperate for recruits, Russia launches a ‘stealth mobilization’

Four Russian veterans of the war in Ukraine recently published short videos online to complain about what they called their shabby treatment after returning to the Russian region of Chechnya, after six weeks on the battlefield.

One claimed to have been denied a promised payment of nearly $2,000. Another grumbled that a local hospital declined to remove shrapnel lodged in his body.

Their public pleas for help got results, but not the kind they were hoping for. Instead, an aide to Ramzan Kadyrov, the autocrat who runs Chechnya, berated them at length on television as ingrates and forced them to recant. “I was paid much more than they promised,” said Nikolai Lipa, the young Russian who had claimed that he had been cheated.

Ordinarily, these sort of complaints might be ignored, but the swift rebuke underscores how Russian officials want to stamp out any criticism about military service in Ukraine. They need more soldiers, desperately, and are already using what some analysts call a ”stealth mobilization” to bring in new recruits without resorting to a politically risky national draft.

To make up the manpower shortfall, the Kremlin is relying on a combination of impoverished ethnic minorities, Ukrainians from the separatist territories, mercenaries and militarized national guard units to fight the war, and promising hefty cash incentives for volunteers.

“Russia has a problem with recruitment and mobilization,” said Kamil Galeev, an independent Russian analyst and former fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington. “It is basically desperate to get more men using any means possible.”

The numbers of battlefield dead and wounded are closely held secrets on both sides. The British military recently estimated the number of dead Russians at 25,000, with tens of thousands more wounded, out of an invasion force of 300,000, including support units.

Yet, President Vladimir Putin hobbled the mobilization effort from the beginning, experts said, by refusing to put Russia on a war footing that would have allowed the military to start calling up reserves. Hence, the Kremlin has tried to glue together replacement battalions through other means.

Avoiding a draft for all adult males allows the Kremlin to maintain the fiction that the war is a limited “special military operation,” while also minimizing the risk of the kind of public backlash that spurred the end of previous Russian military debacles, like the one in Afghanistan and the first Chechen war.

The public outcry after Chechnya prompted Russia to ban the use on the battlefield of raw recruits, men ages 18-27 who are required to complete a year of mandatory military service. The revelations that hundreds were deployed in Ukraine anyway, including some of the sailors who died when the Ukrainians sank the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, prompted the very outrage from parents that the Kremlin had sought to avoid.

Numerous analysts have raised doubts about how long Russia can sustain its offensive in Ukraine without a general mobilization. Igor Girkin, a military analyst and a frequent critic of the Ukraine strategy, has said that Russia cannot possibly conquer the entire country without one.

But the Kremlin seems determined to avoid taking such a drastic step. Instead, recruitment offices have resorted to calling reservists repeatedly to offer cash incentives for short deployments.