Federal budget data shows 71,216 new contract soldiers in Q1 2026, lowest in 3 years
The latest federal budget data confirms a slowdown in recruitment to around 800 per day in Q1, but newer regional data shows stabilization at closer to 1,000 per day in April-May 2026.
According to the latest data from Russia’s Finance Ministry, the federal government spent just 28.5 billion rubles on recruitment bonuses in January-March 2026. As the federal bonus is currently 400,000 rubles, the total number of new contracts in Q1 was 71,216, or close to 800 per day.
This is significantly less than in Q1 2025, when bonuses for 89,601 new contracts were paid out, and also less than in Q1 2024, when the total was 73,366. The federal data closely matches estimates based on regional data, as reported here two months ago.
The combination of all three data sources - federal data, regional data and official statements - makes it very plausible that the daily recruitment rate indeed fell below 1,000 per day in the first months of 2026.
Russian recruitment stabilizes in Q2
According to the latest regional data, Russian recruitment stabilized in Q2, returning to ~1,000 contracts per day or 30,000 per month. On April 30, Dmitry Medvedev announced that the Russian military added 127,000 new contract soldiers in 2026 (1,058 per day). At the end of April, the regional data estimate was closer to 100,000, showing a significant gap between official announcements and budget data. However, this gap can be partially explained by the usual “dip” in spending in January, when budget execution is slow. This means that the difference between official statements and budget data remains close to 10% (the official total in 2025 was 422,704 new contracts, while the federal budget paid out 364,000 sign-on bonuses).
What does it mean?
In recent months, there have been many reports suggesting that Russia is losing more soldiers (killed and unrecoverable losses) than it can recruit. This implies a very high rate of killed and severely wounded servicemen (e.g. 15,000 killed and 15,000 severely wounded per month).
Regional budget data indicates significantly lower casualty numbers. This does not mean that the higher estimates are wrong. There is a lot of uncertainty in regional budget estimates for killed soldiers, because they are based on a small dataset and cannot be triangulated easily (the data in other public sources, such as Mediazona’s “200”, are usually delayed by 6-12 months, the delay of regional budget data is difficult to determine). Budget data from 17 regions shows payouts for close to 10,000 killed soldiers in 2026. If you extrapolate the data from these regions to Russia’s total population size, this would mean around 9,000 killed soldiers per month, or 300 per day.
IF these estimates are close to the truth, the conclusion could be very different from the common argument that Russia faces recruitment problems. I think that this is less likely, but just to spell it out: If the total number of active Russian servicemen is still growing, this could eventually mean less pressure on recruitment, which would be a completely different explanation for moderating recruitment rates. It could even lead to major surprises, such as Putin allowing some of the men forcibly mobilized in 2022 to return home (e.g. in the context of the upcoming elections).
The reason I believe that the “Russian faces recruitment problems” hypothesis is more likely than the “Russia has recruited enough” hypothesis is that (1) the average regional bonus is still increasing and is now at an all-time high, indicating continued pressure to sustain recruitment rates and (2) there is a lot of anecdotal evidence of massive recruitment pressure in some regions. Still, this is not “proof”: It is also possible that only a few regions are struggling to fulfill their quotas, while overall recruitment rates are sufficiently high or even ahead of plan, as Russian Defense Minister Belousov claimed, so I’m trying to keep an open mind.
*All charts are based on data from Russia’s Finance Ministry.
Thank you 👍
More thorough analysis on the topic. Thank you.