Evgeny Zhurin, frontman of a small Russian pop band from the 1990s, had been in pre-trial custody facing 10 years in prison before he was spotted in khakis on the frontline in Ukraine.
Although Zhurin had insisted on his innocence when charged with defrauding a pensioner, it appeared he had chosen not to take his chances in court but to serve on the battlefield instead.
His case, which gripped his hometown of Vologda 450km north of Moscow, is emblematic of a new recruitment effort across Russia. When investigating a case, Russian police now offer suspects the chance to be cleared of all charges ahead of trial if they agree to serve a stint in the army in Ukraine.
The move is yet another novel Kremlin strategy as it seeks to meet manpower needs for the war without resorting to a new mobilisation wave.
In September 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to conscript 300,000 men, the measure caused significant unrest, with hundreds of thousands fleeing the country to avoid military service.
Since then, the Kremlin has sought to persuade men to sign contracts with the army by offering generous wages. It has managed to recruit about 30,000-40,000 soldiers every month, according to an estimate by the UK defence ministry.
Despite its heavy losses, the Russian army is now 15 per cent larger than when it first invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to a recent report by General Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s top commander in Europe.
Oleksandr Lytvynenko, Ukraine’s chief of national security and defence council, told the Financial Times that Russia mobilised more than 385,000 soldiers last year.
While Russia has recently captured more territory in Kharkiv region, Lytvynenko and analysts said it would need far more men to take the city of Kharkiv itself.
Lytvynenko said about 50,000 Russian soldiers had been deployed across the border from Russia’s Belgorod region. He said that while Putin’s goal seemed to be limited for now to creating a buffer zone to protect Belgorod from Ukrainian attacks, future attempts to take Kharkiv could not be fully ruled out.
Short of another mobilisation wave, Moscow is recruiting men such as Zhurin. The 61-year-old, who is sporting a short, greying beard, has posted several updates of his deployment.
“I’m on the frontline today!” he wrote this month. “We’re constantly on the move, sleeping in the woods. We’re storm troopers! First line of defence!
“God willing, when I return from the front, we will still sing my best songs together,” he said. In another online post, he said he had lost 17kg.
Financial incentives, which have raised Russian military salaries to unprecedented levels, have played the biggest role in persuading men of fighting age to join.
Russian regions offer varying packages as they compete for recruits. The one-off bonuses upon joining the army can now reach more than Rbs1mn ($11,000), on top of the monthly $2,150-$2,700 wage that is already about three times the average salary in Russia. Soldiers’ families also receive large payouts in cases of serious injury or death.
The new push comes after tens of thousands of convicted criminals have been sent to the frontline on the promise of amnesty upon their return. With that pool running thin, authorities in March passed a law targeting suspects in criminal cases to be offered a similar deal.
“There’s the ‘special military operation’, manpower is needed,” said Russian criminal lawyer Roman Kondaurov. “So investigators have been given the responsibility to explain to suspects and defendants their rights — and essentially recruit them.”
Suspects such as Zhurin are now being offered a “clarification” document with the option to sign up for the army, Kondaurov said. Police investigators had “effectively become military recruiters now, too”.
Ukraine has also started allowing some prisoners to serve in a bid to deal with critical shortages of recruits. Despite the new measures, the situation for Ukrainian troops — many of whom have not been rotated out since the start of the war — is unlikely to improve any time soon.
Russia continues to “storm us with all available personnel”, Yuriy Fedorenko, commander of the “Achilles” drone battalion in eastern Donetsk region told the FT last month. “The enemy has huge economic, military-industrial and personnel resources.”
He said Ukrainian troops were still holding the line but added: “The price we pay for it is high, very fucking high. We are losing our best personnel.”
Lytvynenko said Russia had learned from its early mistakes in the war and had now “gone back to a Soviet-style military approach” of using brute force.
For Moscow to maintain its upper hand on the battlefield, however, it may soon need to go beyond its creative recruitment strategies, according to a person close to the Russian defence establishment.
“The government can keep riding on this system for a while,” the person said, but “by the end of this year, or early next year, a new partial mobilisation wave will become inevitable”.
As long as the Kremlin shunned another mobilisation wave, a significant Russian offensive would not be possible this summer, the person said.
“The Russian authorities, at least for now, are still ready to sacrifice some operational successes on the front to shield the rest of society from the war,” they said.
Some regions in Russia are already struggling to meet recruitment quotas. In the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, one councillor said the city mainly sent “alcoholics, homeless people, abusers and convicts” to the war. He explained that only two men were recruited in February from his central district because it was a more affluent one and potential draftees lived on the fringes of the city.
Another councillor replied that the city was deploying new approaches and “starting to work with debt collectors” to get more people into the army in exchange for debt relief.
Grigory Sverdlin, founder of the “Get Lost” project that helps Russians escape military service, said there was an evident shortage of soldiers and that cities were putting up huge billboards advertising the wages on offer. “Huge sums of money. But despite this, there are not enough people.”
The government has also resorted to coercive methods, Sverdlin said, including significantly increasing fines for failing to report to enlistment offices.
A digital conscription register that will bar men from leaving the country will come into force in autumn, replacing the more cumbersome postal call-up system.
“They are plugging the gap any way they can,” Sverdlin said, adding that a second wave of mobilisation was “inevitable” this year. “It’s just a question of when.”
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