The mass recruitment of people for the war with Ukraine is becoming increasingly expensive for Russian taxpayers. By the end of March, the cost of paying generous bonuses for those signing contracts with the Defence Ministry had reached approximately 2 billion rubles per day, according to calculations by Janis Kluge, a research fellow at the German Institute for International Security Studies, based on data from the Ministry of Finance and regional budgets.
Of the total amount, according to Kluge’s calculations, approximately three quarters (1.5 billion rubles) are paid by regional authorities, which are forced to spend almost 3% of their budgets on the recruitment campaign. The remainder – 0.5 billion rubles – is financed by the federal treasury.
According to Kluge’s calculations, the recruitment campaign is bringing 1,000-1,500 new soldiers into the troops daily. The influx of “volunteers” remains at the level of the end of last year, even though the mass increase in bonuses in the regions has stopped, and their average size in 37 subjects of the Russian Federation is now 1.4 million rubles.
Compared to levels a year ago, according to Kluge’s calculations, the influx of contract soldiers has almost doubled and covers frontline losses, which NATO estimates at approximately 1,000 people per day.
Expenditure on the “recruitment machine” has soared almost 5 times compared to April 2024, and if the current pace continues, by the end of the year they will cost the Russian treasury 730 billion rubles. This is half the annual budget of the entire higher education system in the country (1.5 trillion rubles per year) and twice the annual expenditures on the national project “Healthcare”, which amounts to 369 billion rubles this year.
Русская служба The Moscow Times
