Kathrine Frich
The hunt for new fighters has taken a dark turn.
When the demand for manpower skyrockets, desperate managers will do almost anything to hit their targets.
Right now, immense pressure is forcing officials into dark corners.
Ordinary people simply going about their daily routines suddenly find themselves trapped in a very dangerous game.
Feeding the grinder
Military offices across Russia face an impossible math problem. Western experts estimate the country loses 30,000 soldiers every month in Ukraine.
To replace those numbers, Moscow ordered local authorities to find more than 400,000 fresh recruits this year.
Since Vladimir Putin refuses to change his high-casualty strategy, recruiters must scramble to fill strict quotas.
Grabbing men off streets
The hunt for new fighters has taken a dark turn. According to the Financial Times cited by Digi24, recruiters are now using intimidation and kidnapping to grab men off the street.
Other aggressive tactics include raiding workplaces and tricking university students into signing binding military contracts.
Janis Kluge, an expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, explained the situation to the Financial Times.
“Local authorities are under enormous pressure to recruit a sufficient number of soldiers every year,” Kluge noted.
Hunting the vulnerable
Instead of looking for eager volunteers, officials actively target people in legal trouble. They hunt down citizens with unpaid debts or suspended prison sentences.
“They know who is in debt, who is under police investigation and who has recently lost their driving licence, and they focus on these men,” Kluge added.
To cast a wider net, Moscow now allows local offices to issue subpoenas all year. They check the military records of ordinary citizens, including women with medical skills.
In the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, police held thousands of recruitment talks last year. The results were dismal. They only convinced 32 people to sign up, and almost all of them faced criminal charges.
Running from the fight
Keeping troops on the battlefield is just as hard as finding them. The Russian rights group Peace Plea reports that at least 28,000 soldiers have been convicted for abandoning their posts.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian think tank called Frontelligence Insight suggests leaked documents show the true desertion number could easily be twice as high.
A general draft remains deeply unpopular. Because of this political reality, local recruiters must keep scraping the bottom of the barrel to find replacements.
Despite positive spin from former President Dmitry Medvedev, actual territorial gains remain incredibly small. The Institute for the Study of War calculated that Russian forces took just 81 square kilometers recently.
Sources: Digi24, Financial Times, TVP World, Peace Plea, Frontelligence Insight, Institute for the Study of War
