Treacherous hope: "Peace talks" and payouts boost Russian recruitment
Driven by high bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over, more than 1,000 men join the Russian military every day.
Recent regional budget data, as well as several investigations by independent journalists, suggest that Russia continues to recruit at a high rate. Both “pull” and “push” factors are at work: Sign-on bonuses from regional governments continue to rise, which likely means that the federal government is leaning heavily on governors to increase recruitment. Meanwhile, recruitment offices are accepting men of all ages and health conditions, an investigation by Radio Free Europe’s “Sibir Realii” shows. At the same time, speculation about U.S.-Russian talks and a possible end to the war is attracting opportunists who hope to pocket a huge signing bonus while avoiding the deadly fighting in Donbas. Given the way the negotiations have gone so far, these hopes are likely to be dashed.
After some more work, I managed to include 37 regions into the recruitment dataset described in an earlier post. Based on the latest budget data, my estimate is 539 new contracts per day in March 2025 in the dataset. Since it covers about 42% of the Russian population, a simple extrapolation suggests that Russia is currently recruiting around 1,300 men per day. Of course, one can question how representative the data is,1 but an estimate of 1,000-1,500 contracts per day can be made with a high degree of confidence.
This is similar to the recruitment rate at the end of 2024. The chart above also shows that there is indeed a stronger seasonal pattern in spending than I assumed in my previous post. The spike in December and the drop in January are probably more due to the way the budget works, rather than large fluctuations in the recruitment rate.
Journalists from the Russian outlet Vyorstka recently got their hands on the actual recruitment data from Moscow (City). This is interesting by itself, but also valuable to the regional budget data approach, because it allows to check if my estimates are plausible at all. Vyorstka found that in the first 100 days of 2025, an average 60 of men signed up in Moscow every day, with a notable increase at the end of March. In March, the average daily rate rose to 74, and in April 1-10 to 99. Here is a chart from the article, which I highly recommend reading:
Unfortunately, Moscow City is not part of the 37-regions dataset, but a comparison to Moscow Oblast is possible. Moscow City has a population of 13.1 million (officially), which translates into 5.6 recruits per million population per day in March. Based on regional budget spending, Moscow Oblast (8.7 million population) recruited 49 new soldiers per day in March2, which is also 5.6 recruits per million population per day. It is too early to tell from regional budget data if Moscow Oblast has seen a similar increase in recents weeks as Moscow City.
Based on these numbers, both Moscow City and Moscow Oblast are recruiting well below the average rate in the dataset for March (9 per day per million population), which is driven by regions such as Bashkortostan (14). Here is an XY plot of all regions in the dataset, and also the March data for Moscow City from Vyorstka.
For comparison, here is the same XY plot, but without Moscow City and Moscow Oblast. Because of their size, these two regions heavily influence the regression. Without them, the regression is closer to the average “1 recruit per 100,000 population” (or 10 recruits per million) described in the previous post on regional recruitment.
The total amount of regional and federal budget spending on sign-on bonuses alone is likely to be around 2 billion rubles per day at the moment ($24 million). In the dataset, average daily spending in March was 855 million rubles (640 million regional and an estimated 215 million federal spending). Extrapolated to Russia as a whole, the figure would be 2.0 billion rubles (1.5 billion regional and 0.5 billion federal), which again should be seen as a rough “ballpark” estimate rather than a precise figure. The total spending from regional budgets (on everything, not just bonuses) was 1.75 trillion rubles in March, which means that spending for sign-on bonuses alone accounted for about 2.7% of total spending. If spending on sign-on bonuses were to continue at the current pace, it would reach 0.4% of GDP by the end of the year.
The increase in regional sign-on bonuses has slowed since the end of 2024. There were significant increases in a few regions in the dataset, and decreases (or announced decreases - perhaps to get more men to sign up quickly) in others. Overall, average bonus payments were around 10% higher in March 2025 than in December 2024.
There is no obvious selection bias in the dataset. It consists of all regions that publish information on recruitment spending. It may not be representative, but it is relatively diverse: It includes regions from all federal districts, the second-richest and the second-poorest region, several - but not all - “ethnic republics” etc. The distribution of the regional sign-on bonus sizes in the dataset is very close to the distribution of sign-on bonus sizes across all Russian regions.
Moscow Oblast spent 8.5 billion rubles until early April. The size of the regional bonus has been 1.9 million rubles this year.
Great article and great work...thanks.
Stepan Vitkov plays into it. He and Trump are totally abused by Putin, by Xi, Iranians, even by Hamas.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6371496494112