Many were killed. Others hid in the fields, forests and basements, sometimes for days, before surrendering to the Ukrainian forces. Frightened, ill-equipped and with very little – if any – training, hundreds of Russian conscripts (prizyvniki) have been captured in the two months since Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region began. Yet another of the innumerable tragedies of Putin’s criminal war, the plight of conscripts is a window into Russia’s ability to conduct a ‘long war’. When neither the army’s relentless press-ganging nor its exorbitant sign-up bonuses and soldiers’ salaries appear to attract enough men to make up for the staggering casualties on the front, it is these boys who are sent to the slaughter.
Reservists, those who had served before or had military training in college, were the first to plug the manpower gaps in Russia’s army: 300,000 were called up in a ‘partial mobilisation’ in the autumn of 2022. Those who survived are still in Ukraine. In response to the increasingly vocal demands by soldiers’ wives and mothers for their release (or at least for them to be granted temporary leave), the Ministry of Defence told the women not to expect their husbands and sons back until their deaths or the war’s end, whichever came first. Two years on, this mobilisation decree has not been officially rescinded, allowing the authorities to continue to call up troops on the sly without announcing another mass draft.
How many thousands of boys will be killed before Russians begin to oppose the war?
The Kremlin has also raided prisons. Presidential pardons issued after half a year in the trenches to volunteering inmates, including murderers and rapists, made such recruitment initially very successful. So much so, that the prison population shrank by an estimated 58,000 last year and a number of prisons were completely or partially closed. Yet once the pardons were replaced last year by probationary terms and the six months of service in Ukraine became endless deployments, the flow of ‘patriotic’ criminals began to dry up despite pressure from the prison authorities.
Along the way, Putin has been turning the Russian military into a mercenary army. In June, the Kremlin increased sign-up bonuses – already over twice the average monthly salary – by more than double, from 195,000 roubles (£1,556) to 400,000 (£3,193). The actual payouts are much larger still as local authorities are expected to sweeten the deal. Richer provinces have supplemented the payments to astronomically high levels by national standards. Krasnodar, Tatarstan and Saint Petersburg each offer bonuses of over one million roubles (£8,000), with Moscow topping the scale at 1.9 million roubles (£15,170). Counting the bonus, a Russian private in Ukraine can earn up to 3.25 million roubles (£26,000) a year, or over three times the national average. (If the US were to adjust its volunteers’ pay accordingly, a first-year soldier would make over $178,000 (£134,000) annually.)
Yet even these enormous salaries are failing to generate troops in the volumes the Kremlin deems necessary. According to the admittedly unreliable data published by the Russian authorities, between 166,000 and 190,000 volunteers joined up the first half of this year – far below the numbers needed to meet the Ministry of Defense goal of 745,000 for the whole year. The reason the Kremlin needs such immense numbers of recruits, of course, is Russia’s astounding casualty rate: an estimated nearly 200,000 have been killed and between 462,000 and 728,000 total casualties since the beginning of the war in February 2022.
And so Putin has reached for the prizyvniki. Before the war, their average age was 20. There is no information on how old today’s conscripts are – probably because of the high number of 18-year-olds straight out of school among their ranks. As much as Putin might have wanted to avoid sending boys into battle, he had little choice. Following the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan and Russia’s conflict in Chechnya there had been a strong and consistent societal opposition to sending draftees into combat. Several weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, the Ministry of Defense admitted that some conscripts were on the front line.
At the time, in an effort to assuage public opinion, Putin promised that soldiers serving mandatory military service would not ‘participate in military activities’, leaving it to ‘military professionals’ to do battle. Yet just a year later, in April 2023, the Duma quietly changed the law to ‘allow’ rookies to become ‘professionals’ by simply signing contracts immediately after being drafted. (Until then, only draftees with at least three months of prior military service or specialised technical and higher education degrees had been allowed to enlist.).
Some 18-year olds signed up out of boyish bravado and under peer pressure. Others were undoubtedly ‘persuaded’ to join by their commanders. This August, conscripts were reported to have been sent to fight in Kursk as reinforcements immediately after enlisting. As the Kremlin is trying to field the estimated 30,000-40,000 troops necessary to push the Ukrainians out of Kursk, more magically spawned ‘professionals’ will be sent into the trenches.
There will be no shortage of boys: this year’s annual spring draft netted 150,000 conscripts – and the autumn draft started on 1 October. And so there will be more grieving mothers like Anna from Novosibirsk, whose 18-year-old son Aleksei was killed in Ukraine, having been sent there after two weeks of ‘training’. Or Anastasiya from Perm, who is still waiting for the body of her son Georgiy, who was reported killed in June. She hopes he may still be alive.
How many thousands – or more likely tens of thousands – of boys will be killed before Russians begin to oppose the war? For now, no amount of protest from Russia’s mothers and wives will stop the Kremlin from turning legions of their husbands and sons into cannon fodder.
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