After the war in Ukraine freezes or ends, the Russian military will begin a long-term effort to regenerate equipment and personnel. How will they recruit the next generation of professional enlisted soldiers and officers, having sustained an estimated 350,000 casualties in Ukraine since 2022? My research finds that the Russian government is already considering this challenge and has begun implementing a strategy for post-war recruiting with a coherent logic. Russia’s strategy is made of three elements: offering higher wages and benefits, tightly managing public engagement and perceptions of the war to suppress bad news and limit protests and collective bargaining, and revising recruiting themes for a post-war context.
While the Kremlin may have a strategy, will enough of the Russian population want to join the military when the war is over? The answer is complex and depends on how the war ends and how it is perceived within Russia. If the high wages and social benefits currently on offer in wartime can be even partially maintained in the post-war period, with salaries that are currently double the national average, future recruiting could be more stable than Russia’s adversaries might hope for. For some Russians, financial incentives alone will not be enough. The Russian military’s actions at war — high-casualty tactics and poor treatment of personnel and their families — undermine three pillars of recruiting and retention that were critical to gaining the public’s trust in the military over the last 15 years: perception of good order, discipline, and well-being in the military; improved service conditions; and broader public perceptions of military prestige. To offset the challenges to come, the Kremlin is revising its approach to target the next generation of recruits.
Efforts to Build a More Professional Military Before 2022
Prior to invading Ukraine in 2022, the Russian military spent nearly 20 years trying to develop a more proficient and professional military. It conducted frequent internal polling of servicemen to learn what factors motivated them to join and remain in service, and it borrowed some concepts from Western militaries. The government allocated billions of rubles to improve military service conditions and raise the prestige of a military career to attract and retain personnel, especially from 2009 onward. The military overhauled training programs; improved barracks and bases; modernized equipment; instituted measures to reduce corruption, hazing, and criminality; and offered improved wages, housing, and other social benefits to officers and professional enlisted personnel.
Several metrics suggest that these efforts paid off. Rates of draft evasion and hazing declined, the military became a highly trusted institution according to polls, its members reported higher levels of job satisfaction according to internal surveys, and Russia’s contract service personnel numbers grew. While conscripts were always a part of the Russian military’s vision and remain so today, by the late 2010s, Russia was recruiting more professional soldiers than conscripts and its military academies were full. However, reforms remained a work in progress, and they did not resolve several of the persistent problems of Russian military culture that had hampered the military’s proficiency and effectiveness prior to the war in Ukraine.
Wartime Recruiting
The Kremlin has taken extraordinary measures to replenish its casualties — currently estimated at 350,000 — since invading Ukraine in 2022. It has attempted three recruiting phases: a hasty recruiting effort in the summer of 2022 that failed to meet requirements, the subsequent mobilization of 300,000 citizens in September 2022, and a second recruiting campaign that has been ongoing since the winter of 2023. Currently, the Russian government is offering high salaries, large signing bonuses, and other social benefits like housing or mortgage support, debt relief, help with utility bills, guaranteed slots in universities for veterans or dependents, and other benefits that extend to the soldier’s immediate family (and parents in some cases). By July 2024, base salary and combat pay combined were double the average national salary at 200,000 rubles a month, putting military wages in the top 10–15 percent of Russian salaries nationally. Patriotism and peer pressure to join friends or family who are already fighting also motivates some volunteers. This campaign has been sufficient to staff offensive operations in Ukraine, albeit while showing some signs of strain — Russia has raised financial incentives a few times to continue to recruit volunteers.
Amid an ongoing labor shortage in Russia, the military was forced to make several policy changes to expand the recruiting pool. In 2022, the military raised service age limits, reduced barriers to foreign fighters and former mercenaries, and lowered many physical and mental health standards. The Ministry of Defense dropped the requirement for a clean criminal record and now recruits directly from prisons, following the Wagner model. Today, the only crimes that disqualify prospective volunteers from serving as a contract soldier are sex crimes against minors, treason, espionage, and terrorism. These lowered standards have averted another round of mobilization for now, but they also created serious problems for the military, like the reintroduction of criminality and discipline problems into units — the sorts of problems that plagued the Soviet and Russian militaries in the 1980s through early 2000s and damaged society’s view of the institution. These extraordinary wartime recruiting measures fill gaps in the short-term but create other long-term consequences for the military’s culture and perception within Russia.
Recruiting for the Future: Big Rubles and Big Spin
My RAND research finds that the Russian government appears aware of potential recruiting headwinds after the war in Ukraine ends and is already implementing a strategy for post-war recruiting. Their efforts generally fall into three categories: offering higher wages and benefits, tightly managing public engagement and perceptions of the war to suppress bad news, and increasing military–patriotic education in schools to target the next generation of recruits.
Material benefits were an important recruiting and retention tool for the Russian military before the war in Ukraine, when salaries and benefits were lower. If Russian authorities can maintain some aspects of the current competitive salaries, enlistment bonuses, and other social benefits of the last two years, it will attract those who are enticed by economic considerations. Housing benefits and mortgage support are particularly attractive benefits, according to prewar internal military polling of Russian servicemen and their families. However, Russia’s ability to fund these expensive benefits after the war ends is not guaranteed. The Russian defense budget faces significant internal pressures, and there are likely to be tensions and tradeoffs between personnel spending and an expected massive rearmament program that will stretch into the 2030s. Even within the personnel spending category of the defense budget, which is classified, the military will have to decide how to allocate rubles for retaining current personnel, recruiting new personnel, and the looming challenge of financing portions of veteran entitlements and benefits. Russia’s personnel spending burden will also depend on the size of the force. Former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s request to raise the military’s size to 1.5 million, with nearly 700,000 of that figure being professional soldiers, seems unaffordable and unrealistic, given competing financial priorities and official prewar numbers hovering around 420,000. 
Managing Perceptions
The Russian government is trying to manage public perceptions of the war to suppress bad news, limit protests and collective bargaining, and shape public views of the military for the future. Its reasons for doing so are probably mostly tied to maintaining domestic stability, but this approach has important implications for military recruiting too. Specifically, the government’s efforts to manage public perceptions fall into three broad categories: framing the war in Ukraine as an existential conflict against the West to raise the stakes and increase the sense of patriotism and duty; linking World War II photos and iconography to the war in Ukraine while casting its soldiers as liberators and heroes; and suppressing or outright criminalizing negative information about casualties, war crimes, and poor combat performance.
When discussing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, the Russian government frequently references World War II and its iconography to link the two wars in the public’s mind. It has used the orange and black St. George’s ribbon (which commemorates that war) pervasively in imagery throughout the war, even more so than in recent conflicts. Russian political officers put World War II–era slogans — such as Stalin’s “Not One Step Back!” — in materials distributed to frontline units, and officials cast Russian soldiers as heroes and liberators sent to “denazify” Ukraine. In Russia, billboards toggle between some of the most iconic Soviet photographs of World War II — such as Soviet troops on top of the Reichstag in 1945 — and Russian troops in Ukraine.
Moscow is also using proven themes in its wartime recruiting campaign, such as appeals to patriotic duty, responsibility, obligation, and masculinity. Common phrases include “Russia: my history, my heroes, my soul, my country, my journey”; “You’re that real man [Ti zhe muzhik]. Be one”; and “Contract service is the choice of real men.” These themes are chosen for their resonance and effectiveness, as they are consistent with prewar Russian polls on patriotism and attitudes toward military service. These polls noted respondents’ frequent responses that “real men” join the military, and that patriotism is a debt to one’s country that is to be repaid when asked.
Russia also suppresses narratives that highlight problems with the war, banning many platforms like the website formerly known as Twitter and YouTube, and some Western news media and think tanks. It has arrested its citizens for “disparaging the Armed Services” by using new laws available since 2022. Russia-based defense analysts can no longer discuss many aspects of the war or military capabilities lest they run afoul of new classification and censorship legislation. The Russian government has also brought many leading military bloggers into their fold, giving them information in exchange (presumably) for a reduction in criticism. Further, information has reached many families about the nature of service in the Russian military at war, so much so that the authorities have taken several steps to ban cell phones at the front and intimidate soldiers’ families to prevent them from coalescing into a group. The government’s efforts have kept much of the Russian population generally supportive and passively engaged in the war, or unable to engage in large-scale protests. In this regard, the Kremlin’s effort to manage perceptions of the war and domestic discontent has been successful.
At the same time, the carefully managed distance between the troops and the population will likely have long-term social repercussions for Russia when the war ends and soldiers are demobilized, and this will create challenges for recruiting the future force. Even now, the Russian population thus far appears wary to embrace its soldiers and veterans — with some calling them the “Noviy Afghantsy (or new Soviet-Afghanistan war veterans)” — which bodes poorly for future public trust in the military. For the past two years, some returning soldiers have committed violent crimes in Russia and received lenient sentences. The Russian government is now paying attention to the looming social problem of postwar reintegration, creating new positions and NGOs, and introducing new narratives on TV to that seek to frame veterans as stable men who have experienced personal growth and resilience.
Russia is already eyeing the next generation of recruits by expanding patriotic education in schools. After the active phase of the war is over, casualties will decline and memories will fade, and the military hopes to find willing recruits ready to enlist. To help achieve this, the government raised patriotic education funding from $70 million dollars in 2022 to $430 million in 2023. Since 2022, Russia has built additional youth military–patriotic camps, established patronage-like relationships between local military units and schools, funded additional patriotic media targeted at children, changed history lessons about Ukraine, and introduced more military arts and crafts for elementary school students. Russian schools now include mandatory lessons on the war, and soldiers and veterans speak in classrooms and in youth clubs. One particularly ill-advised program invited ex-Wagner mercenaries and veterans from the front to meet students and show them combat footage from their phones. Only a few teachers have resigned in protest over the risks these programs pose to the children.
By suppressing negative information and introducing preferred narratives into schools now, the government seeks to reframe the war and convince boys that the war is not so bad as claimed elsewhere and that it is a heroic and just war against Ukraine and NATO. Russia has not yet targeted the parents of today’s pre-teen and teenage boys. Before the war, the top factors cited by Russian parents that convinced them the military had improved since the 1990s and 2000s were better military equipment, a reduction in hazing and more professional commanders, and better service conditions (e.g., better food and higher pay). Given the changed context in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, new recruiting themes may be needed to appeal to parents in the future. Some of the successful recruiting themes from today are likely to carry forward into the future recruiting environment, but targeted toward families. These include themes like “real men” serve and do their duty, the military is a way to earn money and improve social mobility for the family, and serving or dying in uniform can bring honor to the family.
The Motherland Calls — What is the Answer?
While the military wants to recruit professional volunteers into its ranks after the war in Ukraine ends, the success of that endeavor depends on the willingness of the Russian population to sign up. That willingness will depend on many factors: how the conflict ends, how demobilization is managed, if the conflict is viewed as a failure or success inside Russia, and if postwar benefits and patriotism hold. After the war freezes or ends, if Russia can continue to offer high salaries, housing support, and other social benefits, it can attract those who are motivated by economic considerations, particularly as memories fade and casualties decline. With the right messaging, it can likely attract those with patriotic motivations — messages like the need to defend the motherland from NATO, the Russian army can withstand Ukraine and NATO together, and so on. To offer high salaries and benefits, Russia must select the number of officer and professional enlisted billets that it can afford, during a time when the defense budget will also be bearing the weight of a long-term regeneration and procurement program.
On the other hand, there are many intangible factors that influence an individual’s choice to join the military. The recruiting themes that worked in a prewar context — perceptions of order and discipline, better commanders and service conditions, and views of the military as a respectable or prestigious career — may no longer work in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. The incomplete and distorted information about the war that is provided by Russian authorities stands in stark contrast to the reality that thousands of Russian soldiers and their families are experiencing. The military’s actions at war — notably the deception it used against its own soldiers at the outset, harsh discipline and brutal command styles, and intimidation of soldiers’ families — harkens back to some of the darkest aspects of Soviet military culture that the Russian military spent 15 years and billions of rubles to convince the population it intended to change.
Recruiting is a numbers game. When the war ends, how much of the Russian population will remember the cost? For some in Russian society, trust in the military has been broken by how the war in Ukraine is being fought, and no amount of the Kremlin’s money, spin, or censorship will overcome that. The Russian government is taking steps to keep that segment as contained as possible, while it works to keep everyone else enveloped in its preferred narratives. Ultimately, rebuilding the personnel of Russia’s future military will hinge on its ability to lure volunteers with large salaries and social benefits once the war in Ukraine ends, while pivoting to new messaging and carefully crafted narratives about patriotism and the duty to the motherland. For some, this will be enough.
Dara Massicot is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program and an adjunct researcher at RAND.
Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia Commons
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.