Ghost recruits
‘Ghost recruits’: Is Putin raising a Potemkin army to boost troop numbers?
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on August 25 that the Russian army would be reinforced with 137,000 new soldiers as the war in Ukraine grinds on. But analysts say this goal looks impossible for Moscow to achieve.
Putin wants to turbocharge his offensive in Ukraine by pouring in reinforcements, to the tune of 137,000 extra soldiers – bringing the total to 1.15 million active fighters. This would be the biggest increase in Russian military personnel in years, the last such boost being in 2017, when Moscow announced that the army’s ranks had swelled with 13,698 new soldiers.
The thinking seems to be that greater numbers on the ground will give Russian forces the upper hand, amid stalemates in eastern and southern Ukraine.
But analysts are sceptical. “Fine, but as we’ve seen time and again in the past, this is easier to decree than do,” Mark Galeotti, Russia specialist and director of consulting firm Mayak Intelligence, reacted on Twitter.
“What the MOD [the Russian ministry of defence] really wants and needs are more professionals, but that means offering better pay and conditions, in other words real money,” Galeotti’s Twitter thread continued. “You can only go so far hiring convicts!”
“So we may be heading for a further Potemkinisation of the military, with Moscow issuing decrees and the MOD drawing up new orgs that increasingly don’t match the actual numbers in service,” Galeotti went on. “We’ll see if/how this gets operationalised, but at first glance, this sounds like a Kremlin grappling with impotence and a lack of proper ideas how to change the situation in Ukraine,” he concluded.
‘Very few options’ for Russia
Galeotti was referring to the “Potemkin villages”, the trompe-l’oeil urban decorations supposedly built in Crimea in the eighteenth century to hide the poverty from the visiting Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Although this historical legend has since been largely disproved, the word “Potemkin” remains widely used to describe efforts to give a bad situation a flattering image.
The first reason why Putin’s plans look like Potemkinisation is that they are based on flawed arithmetic. The Russian president is using the official data showing the country’s army has just over a million men. “But we’ve known they’ve got far fewer than that since they invaded Ukraine,” said Huseyn Aliyev, an expert on the war in Ukraine at Glasgow University.Ghost recruits
“Estimates range from 250,000 to 300,000 men who are ready to fight,” Aliyev continued. “The rest are civilian members of the army who have been registered as soldiers, or family members of government officials whose names have been added so they can receive military salaries.”Ghost recruits
So even if it bore fruit, the plan to bring in an extra 137,000 soldiers would not get Russia up to 1.15 million men. But even that 137,000 figure seems unrealistic.Ghost recruits
