Even after doubling its sign-on bonus payment, the Russian army’s recruitment rate is falling. Losses may now outpace new enlistments.
December 4, 2024
Dmitry Lovetsky
AP
Quarterly reports on Russia’s federal budget execution are one of the few tools available for estimating the scale of the Russian military’s volunteer recruitment. These documents contain data about government expenditures on contract signing bonuses, which independent researchers have used to estimate the number of new volunteers joining the Russian army every three months. Meduza applied this methodology (with some adjustments) to the government’s budget report for July–September 2014 and compared the results to quarterly figures from past years. Conclusion: the current rate of Russia’s contract recruitment may be even lower than the pace of its irrecoverable losses in Ukraine.
As of October 1, a total of 48.56 billion rubles ($462.5 million) from the federal budget had been spent on sign-on bonuses for contract soldiers in 2024. That’s 16.14 billion rubles ($153.7 million) more than the total for the first half of the year. In the previous (second) quarter, the total amount paid out in sign-on bonuses was 18.1 billion rubles ($172.4 million). Most of the payments for the year so far — 47.4 billion rubles ($451.5 million) — went to the army, while approximately 1.13 billion rubles ($10.8 million) went to new National Guard members.
The decrease in overall expenditures on military sign-on bonuses from the second to third quarter came even despite the Russian authorities more than doubling the size of the payments themselves. On July 31, Vladimir Putin issued a decree raising these one-time payments from 195,000 rubles ($1,857) to 400,000 rubles ($3,809). The previous rates had been in effect since September 21, 2022.
Most of the one-time payments a person receives when signing a military contract are not federal but regional payments. These now reach several million rubles in most regions, though amounts vary from one region to another and are continually increasing.
The existence of a centralized, and until recently, fixed payment from the federal budget makes it possible to trace the development of Russia’s contract recruitment rates. By knowing the total budget expenditures from the quarterly reports and that the size of the payments was 195,000 rubles before August 1 and 400,000 rubles since then, we can estimate the overall number of signed contracts and the change in contract recruitment over time.
In early August, journalists from iStories used the budget report from the first quarter of 2024 to estimate that the Russian army is recruiting about 1.5 times fewer contract fighters than the Defense Ministry claims.
In early September, economist Janis Kluge, a senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, applied iStories’s methodology to data from the year’s second quarter.
Using data from three quarters of 2024, supplemented by past budget reports from 2023 and 2022, we repeated these calculations, with some necessary adjustments to the methodology.
There are two factors making it difficult to calculate the number of contracts signed based on total payment amounts:
Firstly, there may be a delay between a contract being signed, the signing bonus being paid out, and the inclusion of these expenses in budget reports. One indirect indication of this is the sharp rise in payments reported in the final quarter of each year, when the budget must be “closed out.” However, it’s also important to note that unlike other budget payments (for combat injuries, deaths, etc.), which can be delayed without major consequences, contract payments have a direct impact on a person’s decision to sign a contract or not. Any delay in these payments is thus unlikely to exceed a few months.
Secondly, the dramatic increase in the size of signing bonuses starting on August 1 (one-third of the way through the quarter) creates uncertainty about the average payment amount during this quarter — and our estimate of the total number of contracts signed is based on this average payment amount.
If the delay between contracts being signed and bonuses’ inclusion in budget reports exceeded two months in all cases, the average payment amount for the third quarter should remain unchanged at 195,000 rubles ($1,856). This would indicate that 82,000 new contracts were signed in this period. Even in this scenario, which reflects the maximum number of contracts that could have been signed, the number is significantly lower than the 93,000 new contracts signed in the previous quarter or the 113,000 signed in the third quarter of 2023.
In the opposite scenario, where the military’s ability to recruit volunteers by summer has been fully exhausted, meaning no contracts were signed before the payment increase, the average payment amount would be 400,000 rubles. The total number of contracts would then amount to 40,300 — but this is the least likely scenario and represents the “lower limit” of new recruits.
Finally, the most conservative and straightforward scenario is one that disregards both the possible delays and the likely increase in the number of contracts signed after the payment increase. In this case, the average payment would be calculated as ⅓ × 195,000 + ⅔ × 400,000 = 332,000 rubles, and the total number of contracts signed in the third quarter would be 49,000, which breaks down to 500–600 new contracts per day.
In Meduza’s last calculation of Russian combat losses, we estimated the average fatality rate at 200–250 per day by mid-2024. Using a conservative conversion factor to translate fatalities into total losses (based on compensation payments in 2022, which suggest that for every fatality in this war, there are 1.7–2 severely wounded), this means about 600–750 individuals per day fall into the category of irrecoverable losses.
Despite considerable uncertainty, the available data suggests that, on average, Russia’s recruitment of new contract service members is just enough to keep pace with current losses. What is clearer, however, is that the Russian Armed Forces are neither positioned to build significant reserves nor on the brink of collapse.