St Petersburg’s main market is suddenly surrounded by OMON troops (Putins extended paramilitary heavily armed police) early last week. Every man has his papers checked and those without the right credentials – almost nobody – are rounded up and shoved in vans – one of them has no hand on his right arm and is amputated below the right knee. They still force him on to the vans physically lifting him off the ground. He’s been on the frontlines before, but they don’t care.
The OMON troops spread out around the area, cutting off streets, raiding shops and coffee houses looking for any man that can serve on the front lines. They don’t speak or stop to argue, the gun makes it clear where their authority lies.
Scenes like this have been happening all over the Penza and Krasnodar Krai districts, even out as far as Vladivostock, Smolensk and Surgut. There is no official declaration. The authorities don’t want another mass exodus they can’t control like that in late 2022, when 700,000 men – some say as many as a million, left the country and the vast majority have never come back.
Those who are taken away in the vans and buses have been locked up in rooms for hours at a time, no food, no drink and no toilet facilities until they voluntarily sign the contract. The bonuses are high, anything from 1.4-2.5 million roubles, but its not been enough. This years recruitment target of volunteers was supposed to hit over 410,000 but has failed to reach much more that 300,000. Every one knows what it means to be sent to the front, the SMO is now considered a joke, its a full scale war and everyone knows it. More to the point most of them know Russia isn’t winning. If they were they wouldn’t need this new round of forced conscription.
Ugly scenes take place as wives, mothers and girlfriends try to stop the buses in rural areas where communities are more heavily damaged by the loss of men. Gestures and angry words don’t stop the local state police. They have been told to say nothing, to ignore the women and the angry jibes. Go in, get the men, get out, don’t incite any additional trouble. Do it fast, do it neatly.
The affect in many areas has been bad. Remote rural districts where it easy to find the men have become so impoverished so quickly that authorities have had to send out special trucks with emergency food rations as the men who did the work and get paid have gone and whole villages have been stripped of income. The bonus sign up payments are never instant, they can take months. Even that is a cynical ploy to diddle the wives out of their payments. If the soldier dies before he gets paid then the payment almost never arrives. Its a good way for the state to save money. The payment for signing up is replaced by a much lower death benefit – eventually. The waiting time can be a year or more, if ever.
Penza Oblast has been especially targeted. These are people that ‘real’ Russians don’t consider are as valuable as they are. The families protest more and have grown bolder, but the results rarely change. The same stony faced silence from the police helps prevent escalation. They arrive in the middle of the night or at work in the day, the factory or office surrounded. Often employers are told in advance so they prepare their workers to be in a certain place at a certain time, like lambs to the slaughter.
The reasoning behind it all is simple enough. The losses on the frontline are exceeding voluntary recruitment by a huge margin. The bonus payments are no longer persuasive, the salary has been cut.
According to Ukraine 309,900 were killed to the end of September – this year alone. 46,200 died in September alone and more surrendered than ever. According to Russian regional reporting, and using the payment information from Oblast Budgets, only 263,000 were recruited Jan-Sept 2026. Its enough to keep fighting but its nowhere near enough to win. On average at the current kill rate Ukraine is exceeding the Russian recruitment target by 5-10% and its accelerating.
Officially there is no mobilisation. They all say so. The leadership is adamant. Russia wants it to appear that everything is normal, that everyone is a volunteer. Instead its done silently and dumped on Mayors, Governors and local police. If they fail to comply and miss their targets their budgets are cut and those who fail are demoted or fired. The system is known as Bousiki – a word that only Russians could have come up with to describe being shoved into a van and disappeared. They often dont have the police to do the job so they pay mercenary gangs who get paid a bonus for each pickup.
Those targeted vary region to region. In Moscow its immigrants and new Russian citizens (apparently some people still go there for a better life), they will be sent strait to recruitment. In other regions its the unemployed, any man on benefits of any kind, and in others debtors or petty criminals – including those who have been passed up before.
Agricultural workers often have new citizenship and they’re a top target. They’re told if they don’t agree to volunteer, they will be deported and their citizenship cancelled.
Being injected with drugs is another favorite if you won’t go willingly. You can be charged for being on drugs and then conscripted even while intoxicated. If you sign you sign. Industrial worker deferments are ignored, age and health irrelevant. Is it any wonder they end up with such appalling troops on the front?
Having failed to reach targets internally through state sponsored kidnapping, the Kremlin has been advertising across Black Africa and parts of Asia trying to get volunteers – over 46,000 fell for it this year alone. Indonesia, Sierra Leone were the biggest contributors.
North Koreans were expended at a rate close to 15,000 per month this year. They were described as naive and unsuited to modern war.
The fact is the Russians have no means of mobilisng 300,000 men. They can’t afford it, don’t have the equipment for them and no means to train so many so fast. They never have had, and at this stage of the war that situation isn’t going to change.
The central government tries to keep its own costs down by placing it on Oblast budgets, but all that does is push the problems down the line. The money spent on recruitment burns through Oblast budgets and leaves nothing for very much else, leaving conditions across the country to worsen dramatically every year.
The war is grossly unpopular. When asked if they would support Putin if he ended it tomorrow, by the Livadia Centre, 81% said yes.
Russia has consigned its men to die. The Ukrainians will willingly and rightly kill every last one of them they come across if they don’t surrender. You don’t need me to tell you that if this is what Putin and his acolytes are depending upon to win this war, they’ve already lost. But that’s been the case for almost all of the last year. They just cant see it yet, and perhaps only some major defeat in the field will make them do so – one they cannot lie their way out of.
That defeat will come because the state of the army is filled with men who hate what they’re doing, don’t want to be there and don’t believe in Putin’s stupid hubristic dreams of conquest. Is it any wonder Putin is doing what he can to get Trump to help him through these last days – before it becomes patently clear even to Trump, Putin is and always has been a giant loser. You would think one could recognise another.
The Analyst
miltaryanalyst@blueksy.social
This will cripple the Russian economy for a generation, and that’s a very good thing
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