Russian President Vladimir Putin has been packing Russia’s front lines with demoralized men with little to no military training and scant gear as he scrambles to sustain his military campaign amid mounting battlefield casualties.
But mobilizing 300,000 new forces has proven to be difficult, especially after hundreds of thousands of people have already fled the country to escape conscription. Those who remain have been snatched from offices, cafes, and even homeless shelters as authorities struggle to fill the ranks, the Washington Post reported.
Internally, Putin’s unpopular conscription campaign has fueled growing frustration and opposition. With mobilization, “Putin has now brought the war into the homes of many more Russian families,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, told FP’s Ravi Agrawal in an interview.
“Up until this point, he’s tried to portray the war and things inside Russia as normal,” she added. “He’s tried to protect the politically important Russians, but mobilization has blown that apart.”
Since soldiers are insufficiently prepared for war and poorly equipped—with even Putin admitting that some of the new forces are only trained for 10 days—being sent off to fight in the war is often seen as a death sentence.
There are “dozens of anecdotal reports … of untrained, unequipped, and utterly unprepared men being rushed to the frontlines, where some have already surrendered to Ukrainian forces and others have been killed,” the Institute for the Study of War said in a report.
According to the British Defense Ministry, new soldiers are likely even forced to pay out of pocket for military gear, namely body armor—and at an inflated rate. Online, the modern 6B45 vest is now selling for 40,000 rubles, or roughly $640, it said. That is more than three times higher than its going rate in April of 12,000 rubles, or around $190.
Recently deployed reservists’ “average level of personal equipment is almost certainly lower than the already poor provision of previously deployed troops,” the ministry added.
As Russian officials employ discriminatory recruitment practices, ethnic minorities have been disproportionately targeted in the conscription campaign, FP’s Amy Mackinnon reported in September. In Buryatia, Moscow’s fierce mobilization efforts left some men racing to hide in nearby forests in an effort to evade authorities.