Pavel Luzin
Jan 28, 2025
CEPA
The death and disablement of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, acute strains in the defense budget and a looming shortage of military hardware make 2025 the year of truth for Moscow’s armed forces.
With the full-scale war against Ukraine nearly three years old, Russia’s armed forces have lost as many as 700,000 troops killed, injured or missing in action by October last year. Estimates by Russian and BBC researchers suggest at least 400,000 are dead or too seriously wounded to return to duty.
Recruitment has barely covered these losses, forcing Russia to use draftees to counter Ukraine’s Kursk offensive in August 2024, import troops from North Korea, and extend the use of convicts and people under criminal investigation.
By resorting to such desperate measures, Moscow was able to maintain combat pressure and slowly extend its occupation of Ukrainian territory, though its slow progress would not be considered a success when judged against Russian military theory.
In 2025, recruitment will continue to be a significant challenge for the Kremlin, further degrading its ability to field a modern army.
In December 2023, President Vladimir Putin claimed 490,000 contracted soldiers had been recruited to the armed forces during the previous 12 months. A year later, he admitted the actual number for 2023 was much lower, saying in a speech that “more than 300,000” had signed up.
This number correlates with the annual budgetary report, which detailed approximately 330,000 one-time payments (of 195,000 rubles, or $1,900, each) to contracted soldiers. This also confirms an assessment of troop sign-up published by CEPA in March 2024.
Putin announced the official number for 2024 in the same speech, claiming 430,000 contracted soldiers had been recruited during the year. He appears to have been exaggerating again.
Currently there is only a budgetary report for three quarters of 2024 and it suggests fewer than 230,000 were signed up between January and September. It is very unlikely that a further 200,000 signed up between October and December to tally with the president’s boast.
A more probable assessment, which will need to be verified later in the year, is that 60,000–70,000 joined in the last quarter, taking total recruitment in 2024 to about 300,000 and so matching the previous year’s number. This figure would include prisoners and people under investigation, who are eligible to join the military in exchange for criminal charges being dropped.
Alongside a shortage of recruits, the Kremlin also faces the manpower challenge caused by combat losses.
There were 48,000 Russian soldiers missing in action in December 2024, according to a recording of comments by Russia’s deputy defense minister Anna Tsivileva, and more than 50,000 inquiries from Russian citizens to the Ukrainian authorities about missing Russian soldiers by January 2025.
These stark numbers explain why Russian authorities repeatedly increased payments to those who signed up to fight during 2024. They also shed light on the decision to deploy poorly trained drafted soldiers in the Kursk region, and to bring in troops from North Korea, allowing the Kremlin to avoid a new round of mobilization by coercion.
While the option of partial mobilization still exists, this would probably only happen if something extraordinary occurred at the front. Moreover, such a hypothetical scenario would have to resonate as much with the Russian people as for the Russian authorities. And the fact is that even Ukraine’s incursion into the western Russian region of Kursk did not trigger this response.
The continued recruitment of prisoners and people under investigation relies on a “carrot and stick” approach where the “carrot” is money and the promise of freedom if they sign up, and the “stick” is the threat of brutal violence in Russia’s prisons and pre-trial detention facilities if they don’t.
Considering there are more than 700,000 criminal cases in Russia every year, and more than 500,000 convicts, a significant number of new soldiers could hypothetically be recruited from this group in 2025.
But the Kremlin’s problem is not just with the supply of sufficient cannon fodder. The officer corps is also deteriorating due to losses, damaging the structure, discipline and fighting effectiveness of the Kremlin’s damaged legions. As of January 2025, there were more than 5,400 Russian officers confirmed killed and more than half of those were junior lieutenants, lieutenants and senior lieutenants.
The death toll implies multiple thousands of other officers have been wounded, resulting in a significant lack of lower-level commanders, a shortfall that cannot be quickly rectified. The consequence has been an inevitable deterioration in organizational effectiveness.
The challenge for Russia’s military is not an absence of will to fight, but a decreasing ability for their units to act like modern regular armed forces due to the shortage of capable junior officers.
The Kremlin’s cannon fodder can push the Ukrainian army back and gain more territory, but will still fall short when judged against the benchmarks of Russian military theory, which says gaining territory cannot be the central aim of combat.
The main task is always the defeat of an adversary’s forces and to eliminate their ability and will to keep fighting. In 2023 and 2024, the Russian army failed to accomplish this task.
If Ukraine continues fighting, and the West continues its support, the Russian army will not be able to accomplish its main combat task in 2025 either. At the same time, the growing human and materiel losses will make the ongoing deterioration of the Russian army irreversible.
Dr. Pavel Luzin is a non-resident senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University.) In 2017–2018, he was a consultant on the issues of the armed forces, law enforcement agencies, and the defense industry for Alexey Navalny’s presidential campaign in Russia.