Putin orders boost to Russian troop numbers with additional 180,000 service personnel

Vladimir Putin has announced that the Russian Armed Forces are to increase their numbers by a further 180,000 troops, bringing the number of active servicemen to 1.5 million, according to a decree published by Russia’s official legal information portal on Monday.

The decree, which will increase the total number of Russian military personnel to over 2.3 million, will come into force on 1 December, with the Russian government instructed to finance the new troops.

This is the second time in a year that Putin has announced such an increase, having ordered the country’s military to boost troop numbers by nearly 170,000 soldiers in December, and the third time the Russian military has expanded since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The first such decree, signed in August 2022, preceded a mobilisation effort in September of the same year.

The Russian Defence Ministry has not yet commented on Putin’s decree, but said in December that boosting troop numbers was not a new round of mass mobilisation and that the increase was being implemented “gradually, by recruiting citizens willing to sign a contract with the Russian army”.

Putin said in mid-June that there were currently almost 700,000 Russian troops deployed in Ukraine.

Ever since the mobilisation effort in September 2022 that conscripted up to 300,000 men into the army, the Russian authorities have increasingly relied on professional soldiers to boost their numbers on the front lines in Ukraine, improving the lump sum payments given to new military recruits. The Moscow authorities, for example, currently offer new recruits a payout of 1.9 million rubles (approximately €19,000).

According to researchers at the Re:Russia think tank, the annual payments made to military personnel fighting in Ukraine and the compensation payments due to their relatives amounted to between 2.75 trillion and 3 trillion rubles (€29.5 billion–€32 billion) as of late July. This is equivalent to roughly 1.5% of Russia’s estimated GDP in 2024 and 8% of its total federal budget expenditure.