By Halyna Hergert | 2026-05-12

A man holds up his hands for the camera. He has one thumb.

His comrade has no fingers at all. A third recruit can barely stand. All three have just passed a Russian military medical commission and been declared fit for service.

The footage, broadcast on pro-war Telegram channels in recent weeks, is not a fluke. As Russia's pool of willing and able recruits shrinks, the Kremlin is increasingly filling the ranks with people who cannot hold a weapon.

Scraping the bottom

The social profile of Russian forces has shifted sharply since the invasion began in 2022. A fighter going by the call sign Tomasson, who leads the internal security service of the Russian Volunteer Corps fighting on Ukraine's side, told Kontur the change has been dramatic.

"At first these were professional contract soldiers and proponents of the idea of the Russian World," he said. "Later they were joined by mobilized soldiers and convicts. Then after some time the base was made up of people who had chased after the million-ruble payment."

Today's typical recruit, Tomasson said, is someone cornered by debt, homelessness, or broken family ties -- signing a contract to escape one set of problems by taking on another. "Among these people there are almost no businesspeople, executives or government employees," he said.

A second video, posted in mid-April on the Boevoi Reserv (Combat Reserve) Telegram channel, shows a new soldier being handcuffed to prevent him from fleeing his training unit.

The math doesn't work

Ihor Petrenko, a political analyst and head of the think tank United Ukraine, told Kontur that Russia's contract recruitment model has started to fail.

Last year Russia enlisted roughly 410,000 people. By early 2025, recruitment had fallen 20% year over year. Russia now brings in 800 to 1,000 recruits per day, down from 1,000 to 1,200 last year, citing data from German analysts and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Record sign-on bonuses -- averaging 1.47 million RUB (around $15,300) -- have stopped moving the needle. The pool of people willing to trade their lives for debt relief has been exhausted.

Losses are outpacing gains. In the first quarter of this year, Russia enlisted around 80,000 people and lost around 85,000, according to Ukraine's General Staff.

"The current spring-summer campaign could be the last that Moscow wages without announcing a new large-scale mobilization," Petrenko said. Without a new draft, he warned, Russia's offensive capacity could collapse by 2028.

A system getting ready

The infrastructure for a broader mobilization appears to be taking shape.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a mid-April interview that Russia's escalating internet restrictions are likely designed to prevent unrest ahead of a draft.

The Kremlin, he said, envisions mobilizing up to 1.5 million people -- a move that would reach beyond the provinces and into Moscow and St. Petersburg, where public reaction would be hardest to contain.

Ivan Chuvilyaev, a spokesperson for Idite Lesom (Get Lost), an organization that helps Russians evade conscription, said the technical apparatus is already in place. A dedicated module within Russia's Unified Military Registry holds the data of everyone eligible for call-up, according to an investigation published by iStories in December.

"If what is happening right now isn't a mobilization, what is it?" Chuvilyaev told Kontur. "It's just that it isn't called that directly, and it constantly changes its targets." He noted that universities have been assigned recruitment quotas for sending students to the front.

The Kremlin faces a stark choice: launch an official mobilization and risk domestic unrest, or continue the war with the sick, the desperate, and the fingerless -- and watch the army hollow out.