Russia is offering higher pay to lure more military recruits

Russia’s military has a problem: Along the frontlines, battles are fierce … and the casualty numbers are mounting.

In response, Russia is doing everything it can to recruit new soldiers, including using public campaigns, billboards and TV ads sponsored by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which are now part of everyday life.

Some ads focus on masculine identity; from the Russian government’s perspective, it means signing up to serve in battle.

“Themes that they’ve landed on are things like, it is your manly or masculine duty to serve the motherland,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Or real men serve; men who don’t serve are less than.”

Massicot said that, at this point, nearly three years into the war, ideological reasons like patriotism and service aren’t the prime motivators for most new recruits.

“Most people are actually just attracted by the money and the incentives.”

And the money and the incentives are significant.

“They’re offering a monthly base combat pay salary of around 200,000 rubles a month, that’s like $2,000 to $3,000,” she said. “Those wages are in the top 10 to 15% of Russian national salaries, so this is not chump change. This is [giving] a lot of people paychecks that they have not had before.”

In addition to the base salary, Massicot said, recruits get a signing bonus that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

The Kremlin has decided to purchase the blood of its citizens rather than draft it, said Pavel Luzin, a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

“They got hundreds of thousands of new soldiers,” he said. “The problem was that these soldiers were motivated only by money and were not qualified. I mean, they were completely unqualified.”

Luzin said that the Russian military’s mass mobilization effort was highly unpopular early in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So, increasing pay has been the go-to recruiting method, and to a certain degree, it’s been working, but the quality and professionalism of the military is deteriorating.

“All these payments, they have a target audience,” he said. “This target audience [includes] badly educated poor males, of medium age, with a lot of resentments, people from the low classes.”

Luzin said that even with the significant financial incentives, recruitment has slowed down in 2024. As a result, the Ministry of Defense continues to try to fill the gaps by tapping into new recruitment pools, including prisoners.

“They started to recruit, not only prisoners, but also persons under investigation,” he said. “You may choose between carrot and stick. Carrot is money and the promise of freedom [that] you will not be convicted, and the stick is a promise of brutal violence inside of the Russian prisons and so on.”

Even with the ever-increasing financial benefits, Russia is currently simply replacing losses, according to Kseniya Kirillova of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank.

It can’t recruit enough soldiers to change the dynamic on the battlefield.

“It’s probably enough to maintain current conditions of the front line and even to make some small offense, but it’s not enough to occupy, for example, new Ukrainian cities,” Kirillova said.

She said personnel shortages continue to be a problem beyond the front lines, and labor shortages have been a major strain on the Russian economy.

And throwing money at that problem won’t be a sustainable solution.