Russian recruitment fell by 20% in Q1/2026
Despite further increases in sign-on bonuses, Russian recruitment fell to approximately 800 per day in early 2026. Meanwhile, regions paid compensation for 250–300 killed soldiers per day.
In early 2026, Russian recruitment was significantly slower than in the previous year. Both official information and estimates based on regional budget data confirm this trend. According to Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council and Head of Russia’s recruitment commission, “more than 80,000” men had signed a contract on March 27 (930 per day). A few days later, Defense Minister Andrey Belousov claimed that recruitment was ahead of the plan for 2026.
If Belousov’s claim is true, then recruitment was even more ahead of the plan in 2025. In the end of May 2025, the official total was already 175,000, implying a much higher daily rate last year (1182 per day). This cannot be explained by the usual “January dip” and indicates a very different situation this year. Compare the first three months of 2025 and 2026:
Regional budget data suggests that Russia recruited 70,500 soldiers during the first quarter of the year. There was a lot of noise in the data at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026. One reason for this is the pace of budget execution, which typically accelerates in December and begins very slowly in January.
Another reason is that some regions temporarily lowered their bonuses in late 2025 and increased them again in early 2026, as a result of budgetary pressures and/or fulfilled recruitment quotas. Whenever the size of a region’s bonus changes, recruitment estimates become unreliable for a few weeks because it is unclear how much is spent on “old” bonuses and how much on “new” ones. That’s why I created a control group of regions that have not changed their bonuses in the last nine months, in order to confirm the downtrend.
Depending on the source of information, the pace of Russian recruitment was between 1,000 and 1,200 per day in Q1 of 2025. In Q1 of 2026, this figure was between 800 and 1,000 per day. Although federal budget data for Q1 will not be published until May, it is likely to confirm this trend.
I invested some time to improve the dataset and was able to add several regions to the sample, which now covers 40 regions or 47% of Russia’s population, despite one region stopping publication of data (Kirov) and another being excluded because it only publishes the sum of recruitment spending and compensation for wounded or killed soldiers. While this has slightly improved the reliability of the data, it did not lead to notable changes in the recruitment estimates.
The size of regional sign-on bonuses fluctuated in late 2025 because many regions were struggling to balance their budgets and/or did not require additional recruits to meet their quotas. However, the previous trend of increases continued in 2026. The average payment in the dataset reached a new all-time high of 1.47 million rubles in March (median: 1.55 million rubles). For the regions increasing their bonuses, it is safe to conclude that recruitment is not going according to plan and that slower recruitment is not a result of lower targets set by the Ministry of Defence.
Following further analysis of Russian regional budgets, I was able to expand the dataset on regional compensation for killed Russian soldiers to include 17 regions, representing almost a quarter (22%) of the total population. While extrapolation is riskier here than in the case of recruitment, the data is still useful for supporting other estimates of Russian losses in the war.
Although expenditure on KIA compensation was slower in Q1 than in the preceding two quarters, this can be attributed to the “January effect”: The pace of payouts remains faster than a year ago and much faster than in 2024. In the first three months of 2026, the 17 regions in the sample paid compensation to the families of 5,600 killed soldiers, indicating around 25,000 payouts for Russia in total in Q1.
It is important to note that the rate of payouts does not necessarily reflect Russia’s casualty rates in a given quarter. An increase in payouts in 2025 and 2026 could be related to soldiers who were missing or killed in previous years.
Thank you for this brilliant analysis and the hard work to colllect the data. If the recruitment is 20% lower, while the loss rate has increased significantly in Q1 26, the invading power has quite some trouble ahead, probably they have to issue a mobilization.