By AFP and Kontur | 2026-06-02

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on May 26 freeing new army recruits of debts of up to 10 million RUB ($139,000), as Moscow continues to roll out financial incentives to lure more men to fight in Ukraine.

Russia has for more than four years offered lucrative salaries to men signing up to take part in its full-scale offensive against Ukraine. The decree, published by the Kremlin, makes Russians who signed an army contract after May 1 this year and their spouses eligible for the debt exemption. The army contract should be signed for a minimum of one year and be for "fulfilling the tasks of the special military operation" -- the Kremlin's term for its war against Ukraine.

The measure is the latest attempt to square a grim arithmetic: Russia needs to keep signing up soldiers faster than it is losing them while avoiding the political shock of a second full mobilization.

The manpower math

After the September 2022 partial call-up triggered protests and the exodus of more than 261,000 men, Putin has treated another mandatory draft as politically radioactive.

"The Kremlin would not mobilize men in its biggest cities," Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker now living in exile, told the Kyiv Independent in February. "It's the capitals where revolutions may happen. They don't want to disturb people or bring the war closer to their everyday lives."

The numbers behind the decree tell a story of mounting pressure. According to economist Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, whose analysis draws on Russian Finance Ministry regional budget data, recruitment fell to roughly 800 people per day in early 2026 -- down from 1,000–1,200 during the same period in 2025, a drop of about 20%.

Regions paid compensation for 250–300 killed soldiers daily over the same period. Ukraine's President Volodymy Zelenskyy claimed by late March that Russia had lost 89,000 troops killed or seriously wounded in 2026 while recruiting just 80,000 over the same stretch.

Kateryna Stepanenko, the ISW's Russia team lead, told CNN that recent Kremlin measures expanding reserve call-up powers are a revealing signal.

"That is a really big teller that the Kremlin is trying to expand its powers to do a more coercive sort of recruitment than ever before, which is something that the Kremlin tried to avoid to the maximum in the past," she said in April.

Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov publicly insisted last year that recruitment was on track.

"The key issue for ensuring offensive operations remains troop recruitment. Work in this direction is progressing successfully," he told a Defence Ministry board meeting in August 2025, according to Interfax. "This year, we have increased the plan for recruitment into contract military service."

The gap between that official confidence and the budget data has continued to widen since.

A crowded toolkit

The debt write-off decree is this week's installment in what has become an expanding catalogue of co-optation measures. Beyond signing bonuses, which reached as high as 4 million RUB ($40,000) in some regions, Russia has recruited from prisons and pretrial detention centers, a practice pioneered by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and later institutionalized by the Defense Ministry. North Korea sent thousands of soldiers to assist Russian forces after signing a mutual defense treaty with Moscow in 2024. Recruiters have run social media campaigns targeting financially desperate Cubans.

On the ground, some recruitment has taken on a more coercive character. Sergei Krivenko, of the Russian human rights group Citizen and Army, told RFE/RL his organization is receiving a growing number of reports of men being signed up while intoxicated.

"Either they sign for him while he's drunk — like, literally moving his hand for him or something — or they talk him into it," Krivenko said in April. "Then, once he's sobered up, the recruiter says, 'Look, you signed, that's it. Now it's either the enlistment office or prison. Come with me, or you're going to jail.'"

"Russian military leadership needs cannon fodder, not qualified soldiers," Pavel Luzin, a Russian military expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, told RFE/RL last month.

For those who survive and return, the state has built a parallel apparatus of benefits. Russia has established quota-based university placements for veterans and their children, job training, housing assistance and free vehicles for disabled veterans. Its regional Defenders of the Fatherland foundation, founded by presidential decree in 2023 and funded with tens of billions of rubles, helps returning soldiers access housing and medical care.

A second program, Time of Heroes, retrains selected veterans for public service roles as a way of encouraging loyalty to the state. Putin has explicitly cast returning fighters as a "new elite."

A Kremlin official, Sergei Novikov, acknowledged last June the scale of the reintegration challenge: "Around 137,000 fighters have already returned home from the front lines," he said at a state youth forum, adding that they "need to return home in a way that doesn't cause a drop in household income."

Benefits under pressure

The paradox running through all of this is that the economy financing these incentives is buckling under the weight of them. Russia's Central Bank chairwoman stated in late 2024 that there are "practically no working hands left in the economy" and that the situation with workers is "really very acute," as military contracts paying double or more civilian wages drain the labor pool.

That fiscal squeeze has fed directly into recruitment. About 422,000 people signed military contracts in 2025, a six-percent drop from 2024, with some regions reported to have cut sign-up bonuses due to economic strain. The volatility at the regional level has been whiplash-inducing: in October 2025, Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Mari El, Samara and Orenburg all cut bonuses to the federal minimum as budgets came under pressure, only to raise them again in January 2026. A lawmaker on the parliament's economic policy committee said the initial reductions were likely due to cuts in transfers from the national budget.

Maria Vyushkova, a researcher specializing in regional and ethnic disparities in Russia's war casualties, offered a bleak assessment to the Kyiv Post.

"For the Russian army, 2025 was marked by the greatest number of human losses since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine," she said in January. "To continue the war, the Russian military requires a constant influx of new soldiers."

At the same time, she noted, both federal and regional budgets are under severe strain -- and as financial incentives weaken, she expects recruitment tactics to become more coercive.

"Supplying cannon fodder for the war is now considered the main indicator of effectiveness for Russian governors," she added.

The fairness problem

Putin's decree carries a structural tension that analysts and veterans' communities have flagged since its predecessor in November 2024. The measure exclusively benefits those signing contracts from May 1, 2026 onward, offering more generous terms to new entrants than to the hundreds of thousands already deployed under more modest conditions.

ISW analysts noted in February that the wide-ranging social benefits being offered to attract new volunteers "are significantly straining the Russian budget," and warned that Putin may be preparing to curtail benefits and compensation for existing troops in order to grant the economy some breathing room.

That prospect has already generated friction. The Jamestown Foundation has noted that "the lack of opportunities for returning veterans and the reduction in payouts for new recruits are increasing their frustration," and that "the government has fewer resources left to incentivize these people."

Recruiters themselves have reportedly conceded the limits of purely financial appeals, with some telling independent outlets that "everyone who wanted to make money from the war has already signed up."

The Re: Russia analytical project estimated last year that meeting Russia's manpower needs would require signing bonuses two to two-and-a-half times current levels -- a figure it described as "unrealistic under current fiscal conditions."