Russia to hire contract soldiers in bid to avoid unpopular draft

Russia’s using generous financial incentives to attract people to the war. Since the beginning of the year, regional payouts to new contract soldiers have increased 40% to an average 470,000 rubles (around $5,000), according to calculations by Re: Russia, a Vienna-based research group set up by former government adviser Kirill Rogov. That’s in addition to a flat rate federal payment of 195,000 rubles.

“The Russian authorities are trying not to carry out a new mobilization, as long as they have the opportunity to avoid it,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian military expert who’s a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation.

Ultimately, any call-up would be President Vladimir Putin’s decision, and the Russian leader has stoked speculation the Kremlin is preparing the ground for a potential next mobilization of reservists by accusing Ukraine without evidence of involvement in the Moscow concert hall attack last month that killed more than 140 people, even as Islamic State claimed responsibility.

For now, the army command is in part relying on getting some current conscripts to sign contracts, according to two people familiar with the situation. This spring, 150,000 Russians will be drafted for standard military service.

The law allows those conscripts to be sent to the battlefield after four months of military service, said Luzin.

However, that would violate repeated public pledges not to deploy conscripts to the war zone, so army officials are pushing them to switch to a professional contract, which they can do from the first day of their service under legislative changes approved last year.

“Everything happens on an absolutely transparent and voluntary basis,” Andrei Kartapolov, a former deputy defense minister who’s head of the lower chamber of parliament’s defense committee, told RTVI channel.

In fact, an increasing number of draftees are complaining of significant psychological and in some cases physical pressure, according to Idite Lesom, or Get Lost, a non-government organization that helps people who want to avoid being sent to fight in Ukraine.

“They put one boy into a pit and kept him there for several days without food until he agreed to sign a contract,” said the group’s head Grigory Sverdlin. The contracts are officially for one year, but can only be revoked by the Defense Ministry during wartime mobilization, so they’re effectively permanent until the conflict ends, he said.

So far, Russia’s approach appears to be working.

“For the current strategy of inflicting ‘a thousand cuts’ and broad pressure on Ukraine along the entire front, the available manpower and its replenishment through contract recruitment is apparently enough,” said Pukhov, from the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

Russia probably can’t consolidate control over eastern Ukraine by taking the well-defended cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk this year, he said.

Still, Putin’s goal is to have the West reach the “conclusion that Russia prevailing in Ukraine is inevitable and that we must stay on the sidelines,” said Nataliya Bugayova, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.