Putin Orders a Sharp Expansion of Russia’s
Hard-Hit Armed Forces
The decree
suggests that President Vladimir V. Putin expects a prolonged war in Ukraine,
but he stopped short of full mobilization, and it was not clear how the
military would reach his goal.
Anton
TroianovskiIvan Nechepurenko
By Anton
Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko
Aug. 25,
2022
President
Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s
armed forces, a reversal of years of efforts by the Kremlin to slim down a
bloated military and the latest sign that he is bracing for a long war in
Ukraine, where Russia has suffered heavy losses.
The decree,
stamped by the president’s office and posted on the Kremlin website, raised the
target number of active-duty service members by about 137,000, to 1.15 million,
as of January of next year, and ordered the government to set aside money to
pay for the increase.
It was the
first time in five years that Mr. Putin had issued an order changing the
overall head count of the Russian armed forces. Officials offered no
explanation for the move, and there was little mention of it on state
television.
Mr. Putin
acted at a time when he appears as far as ever from his goal of bringing all or
most of Ukraine back into the Russian fold, and as his military is struggling
with its manpower. American officials said Mr. Putin’s decision is a signal
about just how acute those problems remain. Since his invasion began in
February, U.S. and British military officials estimate, Russia has suffered up
to 80,000 casualties, including both deaths and injuries. Those losses and the
lack of movement at the front led some analysts to describe the order as a
signal that, after six months of fighting, Mr. Putin had no plans to relent.
“This is
not a move that you make when you are anticipating a rapid end to your war,”
said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “This
is something you do when you are making some kind of plan for a protracted
conflict.”
Still,
military analysts puzzled over how the Russian military, without a major draft
and having already tried to tempt and strong-arm potential volunteers, would
manage the task of increasing its ranks so sharply.
There is
mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine could stretch to next winter and
beyond. Russia’s offensives in the east and south have slowed to a crawl and
neither side has shown any readiness to negotiate or compromise. In Ukraine, a
top security official recently warned that the war’s hardest days may still lie
ahead.
“It’s going
to be very difficult; it’s not going to be easy,” the official, Oleksiy
Danilov, who heads the National Security and Defense Council, said in an
interview with Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded independent news organization. “And
if someone thinks that we have already passed some kind of Rubicon and that the
rest will be like clockwork, unfortunately, it will not be.”
Looking
ahead, Ukraine’s leaders have tried to keep their Western backers unified — and
sending weapons and money — and on Thursday President Biden reaffirmed his
support in a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, White House
officials said in a statement. But Mr. Zelensky’s military has not regained
significant territory in recent weeks, despite a series of high-profile strikes
far behind enemy lines.
But Moscow
continues to rain rocket strikes around Ukraine, including on Wednesday, when
two dozen people were killed in an attack on a train station in the east. And
U.S. officials have warned that Moscow may soon try to stage sham referendums
in Russian-occupied regions, like the one held in Crimea in 2014, that are
designed to provide a veil of legitimacy as Moscow moves to seal its control,
through either annexation or propping up proxy forces.
Mr. Putin
said this month that his troops were “liberating” eastern Ukraine “step by
step,” even as pro-war commentators in Russia have been urging him to escalate
the intensity of the fighting, and mobilize more of the country’s resources to
do it.
The calls
for escalation grew louder this week after the car bombing outside Moscow that
killed Daria Dugina, an ultranationalist commentator, and Ukrainian sabotage
and drone attacks well behind the front line in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula
that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
Amid those
demands for aggressive action and the Kremlin’s insistence that the fighting is
going according to plan, analysts have been struggling to game out Mr. Putin’s
next move: Is he preparing to increase the intensity of the campaign, maintain
it at its current pace, or look for a way to end the war?
Most Russia
analysts acknowledge that trying to predict Mr. Putin, a former Soviet K.G.B.
officer who spent most of the pandemic cloistered even from his closest
advisers, is a speculative challenge that rarely involves much evidence to
assess. But Thursday’s decree about expanding the size of the army suggested
that Mr. Putin was prepared to continue the war, though it was unclear how the
military would achieve his goal.
“It’s a
troubling announcement,” Ms. Massicot said, “but I question their ability to
see it through.”
Under Mr.
Putin, officials have tried to transform the Russian Army from a Soviet-era
military reliant on conscripts to a professional fighting force more akin to
Western militaries. The Defense Ministry worked for years to recruit contract
soldiers, while reducing the length of required military service for men ages
18 to 27, to one year.
The Kremlin
has insisted that only contract soldiers and volunteers are part of the Russian
force fighting in Ukraine, continuing to refer to the war as only a “special
military operation.” Men from occupied areas of Ukraine have been pressed into
service, however, and reports have emerged of Russian conscripts being sent to
the front.
“The order
in my view does not necessarily presage a larger draft, or greater
mobilization,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a
research institute in Arlington, Va., said on Twitter. “It could, but it may be
a way of accommodating the various current recruitment efforts.”
The Kremlin
may plan to fold into its military the Russian proxy forces of the
self-declared, breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine, he added, “especially if
they go through with annexation” of those regions.
Mr. Putin
has not declared any kind of large-scale draft, despite frequent predictions
from analysts and Western officials that he would have to make such a move in
order to replace soldiers who are killed and injured.
Instead,
the Russian authorities have been luring people to enlist by offering them
hefty cash incentives and other perquisites. They have recruited Syrian
fighters and mercenaries to join the combat in Ukraine. And in May, Mr. Putin
signed a law that scrapped the age limit of 40 for new recruits.
Analysts
said that Mr. Putin’s decree enlarging the army did not necessarily augur a new
draft — something that the Kremlin has apparently tried to avoid in order to
maintain a sense of normalcy for much of Russia’s population. Instead, they
said, the military could increase the number of young men who are conscripted
at any given time for their mandatory year of service, or lengthen the duration
of that service.
Some also
speculated that the decree could be laying the bureaucratic and budgetary
groundwork for incorporating other forces into the military — such as the
battalions of “volunteers,” now fighting in Ukraine, from Chechnya and other
Russian regions.
Pavel
Luzin, a Russian military analyst, said the military expansion decreed by Mr.
Putin on Thursday would bring the targeted size of the force back to levels
last seen in the early 2000s, when Russian soldiers were fighting a second war
in Chechnya.
Given
Russia’s shrinking population and the ravages of the war, he added, it was hard
to imagine enough conscripts and recruits being assembled to meet the target
laid out in the order.
“The
Russian army in today’s conditions can never be a million-man army,” Mr. Luzin
wrote. “Especially with gigantic losses and mass departures in conditions of
war.”
Michael D.
Shear and Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
Anton
Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. He was
previously Moscow bureau chief of The Washington Post and spent nine years with
The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York. @antontroian
Ivan
Nechepurenko has been a Times reporter since 2015, covering politics,
economics, sports and culture in Russia and the former Soviet republics. He was
raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Piatykhatky, Ukraine. @INechepurenko
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