Putin orders Russia to recruit 137,000 more troops

Bloomberg

President Vladimir Putin ordered his army to boost its troop total by 137,000 to 1.15 million, the highest level in more than a decade, as Russia digs in for its war against Ukrainian forces backed by the US and its allies.
Putin’s brief decree, published on the Kremlin’s website, didn’t explain the motivation for the increase or where the new recruits would come from. Russia has turned to private military contractors, local “volunteers” and recruits from among prison inmates to replenish the losses it has suffered in six months since it invaded. So far, the Kremlin has avoided a mass mobilization or even an official declaration of war, seeking to limit the domestic fallout from the campaign.
But as its advances have stalled in recent weeks in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance and growing supplies of sophisticated US and European weapons, Russia’s military is under growing pressure to deliver on the Kremlin’s promised goals.
“Ukraine has shown that there are wars that you need bigger conventional forces to win because you can’t use nuclear weapons,” said Vasily Kashin, a Russian military expert at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “If Russia had had 400,000 or more ground troops in February instead of the 280,000 it did, the outcome would have been very different by now.”
Russian men are required to serve one year in the armed forces but the Kremlin has said it won’t deploy conscripts in Ukraine. But the high toll from the conflict has led to speculation that the government may seek to recruit more soldiers and the authorities have already raised the maximum age to sign up. Colin Kahl, US under secretary of defense for policy, said this month that as many as 80,000 Russian troops have probably been killed or wounded in Ukraine in less than six months.
An increase as big as that envisioned in Putin’s decree could be a challenge to produce, given Russia’s shrinking population, especially among younger ages. Even before the war, the Kremlin offered recruits from neighboring countries the chance of citizenship if they served in its army.
“This is a long-term step, not about the present,” Kashin said of Putin’s decree.
Putin last changed the troop level in 2017, raising it by 13,628 troops, but the latest decree brings it to the highest level since at least 2005, when Russia relied much more heavily on conscripts.