Russia is resorting to increasingly drastic measures to find recruits. The list has grown: beyond coercing detainees and conscripts, Moscow is now pressuring businesses to supply contract soldiers while further raising enlistment payments. 🧵Thread with all recent updates:
2/ Thanks to recent updates from @CITeam_en and iStories, we’ve learned that In Russia’s Primorsky region, officials told local business leaders they must help recruit men for the front. Employers were instructed to pressure their staff into signing contracts or contribute money
3/ In Voronezh oblast, officials sharply raised the bonus for signing a contract with the Defense Ministry. Governor Alexander Gusev boosted the regional payout from 505,000 rubles to 2.1 million. With federal payments added, the total now stands at 2.5 million rubles (~$27,000)
4/ Russian politician Boris Nadezhdin shared a photo taken outside a military recruitment office in Dolgoprudny. A banner above the entrance advertises unusually generous contract payments of 6 million rubles - roughly $73,000.
5/ In 2024–2025, at least 33 conscripts were killed in fighting in the Kursk region, and hundreds were taken prisoner, with at least 300 later returned to Russia in exchanges. According to the @hochuzhit_com project, by April 2025 no fewer than 217 conscripts were KIA.
6/ A glaring example involves three conscripts - Viktor Baturin, Nikita Molochkov, and Nikita Borisov. In 2023, they tried to challenge their contracts in court, claiming their signatures were forged. The cases were dismissed, and all three were KIA on the frontlines.
7/ According to an iStories report, the flow of information on pressure against conscripts shows no signs of slowing. Alexey Tabalov, founder of the human rights group “School of the Conscript,” notes: “I assess the risk of being sent from regular service to the war as high.”
8/ Russia is also recruiting from the arrested, not just prisoners. In the Ulyanovsk region, 36 people were charged with drug dealing this year. Two-thirds avoided trial by signing contracts with the Defense Ministry and going to war - trading potential sentences for the war
9/ Taken together, these cases confirm our earlier assessments: Russia is struggling to attract enough voluntary sign-ups to meet frontline needs and is turning instead to coercion - targeting conscripts, newly arrested suspects, and vulnerable workers.
@Tatarigami_UA @KofmanMichael Russia isn't going to run out of people, it's going to run out of the increasing amounts of money necessary to acquire those people. Russia COULD resort to mass conscription, but if it does, it risks mutiny & routs from low morale. Russia will be exhausted by 2026.
@Mankosmash @KofmanMichael When men are pushed to the front against their will, especially amid existing war fatigue, desertion rates soar. That’s why Ukraine’s forced drafts fueled desertion, and why Russia is now seeing the same spike. A shortage of money will only make it worse.
@Tatarigami_UA 4 of the immediate responses instantly accuse Ukraine of kidnapping people off the street. How to say 'Bot' without saying 'Bot' $73,000 per sign-up? Current sign-up bonuses were costing Mordorvia @ $1.25 billion per month. This figure would escalate it to $2 billion
@Tatarigami_UA The real kicker is that most of them won't get paid out at all because when they die Russia will just claim they are MIA and don't have to pay anything to the family
@Tatarigami_UA 73 000 $ for to be killed and leave this money for family
@Tatarigami_UA Russia’s manpower drive runs on quotas, cash, and coercion: regions are assigned targets, sign on bonuses ballooned into millions of rubles, and prisoners and conscripts are pushed into contracts. The side effect is a war tax on the labor market, as firms lose staff and the state
@Tatarigami_UA "Get paid to die" scheme
@Tatarigami_UA Yet another reason to increase the pressure on Russia's export sectors, which fuel its imperialist ambitions.
@Tatarigami_UA Meanwhile you just blackbag guys off the street to feed the meat grinder lol. (You still have a desertion and recruitment crisis btw)
@Tatarigami_UA Strelkov wanted full mobilization right from day 1
@Tatarigami_UA Do you think this guy received $73k? 🤔
@Tatarigami_UA How is offering good compensation for soldiers vs Ukrainian forced conscription drastic measures?
@Tatarigami_UA I know there is no statistically significant data on that but I wonder, how much of the newly increased military pay goes to necessary equipment purchases (for units or soldiers themselves) and get extroverted by their immediate superiors I wouldn’t be surprised is it is over 30%
@Tatarigami_UA Bet they wont get paid! Mugs!
@Tatarigami_UA They can crash the economy and then benefit from people going to jail for being debtors, offering them conditional release for military service. More macevellian Mafia mentality.
@Tatarigami_UA Says someone, who's country is kidnapping people from streets?🤣
@Tatarigami_UA In Ukraine, TCC goons acquire recruits by violently kidnapping them off the streets. You should worry about the atrocious recruiting practices in Slava Ukraini land.
@Tatarigami_UA It's becoming more and more difficult to find idiots. I am afraid they may start open mobilization
@Tatarigami_UA So the russian leadership wants to send more people to the meat grinder? This decision will once again jeopardize the future of this nation. This country is really going down the drain!
@Tatarigami_UA These chimpanzees will never see the money, many that have a bit of human brain, have already seen reality and are running away.😄👍
@Tatarigami_UA Do they kidnap people on the streets too?
@Tatarigami_UA That's a good sign not bad
@Tatarigami_UA Think this beats kidnapping men off the streets lol
@Tatarigami_UA It's still better than kidnapping people.