Russia’s ‘hidden mobilisation’: the expendable lives fuelling Putin’s war on Ukraine

A broadcast interview names the pattern Moscow will not announce

On Thursday, France 24 broadcast an interview with John Lough, a senior research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre and an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme, in which he set out the social arithmetic sustaining Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin, he argued, has disproportionately recruited its soldiers from poorer and politically marginalised communities, including ethnic minority regions, where the human cost of the war is least likely to generate political trouble at home.

There has been no second mass call-up since President Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilisation decree of September 2022. What has replaced it is quieter and harder to count; men picked up in the street in Penza, detentions in central Moscow, contracts signed by people who cannot read them, and job offers abroad that end at the front. On 26 October, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine told the General Assembly it had found compelling evidence that Russian authorities had trafficked men from 29 countries into the armed forces through deception and coercion.

The money first, then the pressure

For most of the war, the system ran on cash. Recruits sign short-term contracts with the Defence Ministry and receive a federal lump sum of 400,000 roubles, a salary several times the national average, and a regional sign-on bonus on top. The bonuses have climbed to record levels: a study of regional budgets puts the highest sign-on payments in the first seven months of 2026 at 1.65 million roubles, and the average regional cost of a contract rose by nearly 30 percent.

The pipeline is thinning even so. Research based on regional government spending, examined by military recruitment analyst Janis Kluge, puts contracts signed in the first nine months of 2026 at about 263,000, against 292,000 in the same period of 2025; September brought about 29,900. L’Express, citing ministry sources, reported that the Defence Ministry has recruited about 140,000 men this year who are still awaiting assignment, and still needs at least 100,000 more by mid-December, for a total of 250,000 to 300,000.

As the money thins, the methods harden. CNN reported in October that vulnerable men, older, ill, in debt, struggling with alcohol, are being targeted in cities including Penza, where residents described police moving from street detentions to door-to-door visits. Governors now pay “bring a friend” bonuses of 50,000 to 300,000 roubles for each person delivered to a recruitment office, On 7 November, between 150 and 300 people were detained near the Kitay-Gorod metro station in central Moscow, including minors, and some of the adults detained were given military summonses or pressed to sign contracts; Moscow police described the operation as a preventive public-order measure.

How many men has the quiet draft actually taken?

No official count exists of how many of the roughly 263,000 contracts signed this year were signed freely and how many under pressure, because the coercion is designed to look like volunteering: a signature on a contract, a bonus paid, a debt cleared. The distinction matters, and it is the hardest fact in this story to establish. The same gap surrounds the casualty figures. NATO estimated that about 50,000 Russian soldiers were killed in September, a record month; Ukraine’s General Staff put Russian personnel losses, killed and wounded together, at more than 54,000 in October, and at nearly 23,000 in ten days at the start of November. The two series measure different things, and neither can be independently confirmed from the front.

It is also unknown whether the Kremlin will formalise what it is already doing. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said a forced recruitment campaign of colossal proportions is imminent, possibly involving 300,000 men after the State Duma elections of 18 to 20 September; analysts who study the regional recruitment economy consider a covert expansion far more likely than a public one, given the political damage of the 2022 call-up.

A war paid for by the people least able to refuse it

The pattern matters because it decides who bears the cost of a war now in its fifth year. The recruitment burden falls on the poorest regions and on peoples whose numbers are small enough that the losses scar whole communities: the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, has documented mobilisation hitting small indigenous communities especially hard, naming the Selkups, a people of about 3,000 to 3,500 near Tomsk, among them. In Moscow and St Petersburg, she said, mobilisation has been carried out largely online and by relatively less coercive methods; in remote Siberian villages, Interior Ministry officials have arrived by bus, gone from house to house, and taken men away. The political logic is plain: the centre is spared, the periphery pays.

It matters, too, because the fear is now measurable. The independent Levada Centre found in October that 57 percent of Russians fear another general mobilisation, six points more than in September 2025. The Kremlin’s answer has been to normalise the draft without declaring it, the Royal United Services Institute’s phrase, through year-round conscription rules, door-to-door visits and a market in recruits.

The political economy of expendability

Step back from the individual cases and the system reveals its design. Russia’s recruitment is organised as a quota market: Moscow sets the numbers, the 89 regions deliver them, and the federal budget pays a flat 400,000 roubles while the regions bid against each other with their own bonuses. The 2022 partial mobilisation decree has never been repealed; the Russian Supreme Court has confirmed it remains in force until specifically revoked. The legal architecture of a draft therefore exists already, and the quiet version operates inside it, one signature at a time.

The arithmetic is what makes the quiet version unsustainable. About 263,000 contracts in nine months against losses running above 50,000 a month in the autumn means the pipeline no longer replaces what the front consumes Moscow’s dependence on African and Asian recruits, part of the widening footprint this newspaper has documented across the continent, is the same market extended across borders: poverty arbitraged at a larger scale. The Bureau has previously reported the case of a Botswana architect caught up in the Russian war effort, one life inside that market.

What happens when the money runs out?

The first consequence is fiscal: regional budgets that bid against each other for recruits cannot sustain bonuses that rise by a third while their tax base shrinks, and the federal budget is already carrying the war. The second is social: men return from the front to communities that sent them, and the rapporteur has documented soldiers who commit violent crimes after returning and avoid accountability by signing another contract; a cycle in which the war absorbs its own consequences. The third is diplomatic, and it is already visible: Indonesia’s formal protest, Kenya’s warnings, South Africa’s arrests and the Interpol operation at OR Tambo suggest the foreign pipeline will now be policed at its source, not only at its destination.

The December test and the watch on the regions

Three markers will show whether the quiet draft holds. The first is the mid-December deadline: the Defence Ministry’s own planning calls for 250,000 to 300,000 new men by then, and the autumn figures suggest the target will be missed or met only by harsher means. The second is the regions: whether governors keep raising bonuses or turn openly to coercion as their budgets thin. The third is the foreign front: whether the UN commission’s findings produce discharges for the trafficked men it identified, whether South Africa prosecutes the nine detained at OR Tambo, and whether Indonesia’s protest is answered. Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to press for tighter sanctions on the Russian war effort, arguing that the pressure must reach the system that feeds the front.