Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to grow his country’s armed forces, but experts say his ambitions could come at the expense of Russia’s economy.
On Monday, Putin ordered the army to increase its troops by 180,000, per a decree published by the Kremlin.
This will raise the overall number of Russian military personnel to 2.38 million people, with 1.5 million of them being active soldiers.
The expansion, which will take effect in December, would give Russia the world’s second-largest army, behind only China and ahead of the US and India, per Reuters, which cited data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
This isn’t the first time Putin has sought to expand the army since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian leader ordered an increase of 137,000 troops in August 2022, followed by an increase of 170,000 in December 2023.
Nick Reynolds, a land warfare research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said the increase is consistent with Russia’s ongoing war planning.
In February, Reynolds coauthored a commentary that suggested that 2025 would be a make-or-break year for Russia. Russia believes it can sustain current troop and equipment losses through 2025, with the belief that “victory should be achieved by 2026,” they wrote.
That’s not implausible if Ukraine’s Western allies don’t keep supporting it, they added. But after 2026, Russia will begin to run out of existing stocks of tanks and armored fighting vehicles and will have to rely on producing new ones.
The gear coming off the production line “will still be substantial,” Reynolds told BI in an interview on Wednesday. “Just significantly less than they are now.”
That raises the question of how Russia can resource its even bigger army when it is already stretched.
“Where are the resources going to come from? How is the recruitment going to work?” Reynolds said, adding: “There are still some serious questions about how they will be equipped.”
It’s also hard to see how the current training pipeline could support the expansion, he said.
The increase in the army comes at a perilous time for Russia, which has to balance its military objectives in Ukraine against the toll the war is taking on its economy.
Russia has “adapted much better than predicted to some of the pressures it’s been put under,” Reynolds told BI. But despite this, he said, “inflation is through the roof. The cost of living is through the roof.”
Other experts BI spoke to said that while Putin might still be able to grow Russia’s army, it may only add more strain to the already-stretched Russian labor force.
Artem Kochev, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, told BI that Russia’s labor market would be less affected if military recruitment is done in a targeted fashion.
“Currently, new recruits can be split into two groups: indebted people with low socio-economic status, and prison convicts,” Kochev said. “They either participate in the less productive branches of the economy or are not part of the labor market at all.”
Russia has recruited so many inmates that it has started to shut down some of its prisons, with one local official telling lawmakers in March that some prisons had to be shuttered because of “a one-time large reduction in the number of convicts,” per Russian newspaper Kommersant.
“As long as recruitment stays within those two groups, the impact on the labor market will be limited,” Kochev said, but noted that, even then, enlisting new recruits would still pose a sizable fiscal burden.
In July, Russian media reported that new recruits in Moscow would receive a bonus of 1.9 million rubles, or about $22,000, if they signed a contract with the Russian defense ministry.
That package is on par with the bonuses offered by the US military to their recruits, which range from $20,000 to $50,000.
And even if money weren’t a problem, Russia would still find it difficult to achieve its recruitment goals without hobbling its own economy.
“Taking another 180,000 people out of the labor force would have a serious impact on the economy,” said Benjamin Hilgenstock, a senior economist at the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.
He added: “The labor market is already extremely tight with the unemployment rate dropping to 2.4% in June, which is basically full employment, and nominal wage growth now above 15% year-over-year.”
The hunger for more troops has seen Russia turn to an unlikely source — African migrants and students.
In June, Bloomberg reported that Russian officials had threatened not to renew the visas of African migrant workers and students if they didn’t join the Russian Armed Forces.
Jeremy Morris, a global studies professor at Aarhus University, told BI that Russia’s economic problems could overshadow its military challenges if left unattended.
“Authoritarian societies like Russia seem calm and controlled, but destabilization can happen quite abruptly,” he said.
