Putin’s army has a people problem

Money is an expensive way to run an army, for a start. Every rouble spent on bounties is a rouble not spent on tanks, drones or the schools and hospitals that Russians were promised.

When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine 1,697 days ago, the last thing he expected to have was a manpower problem. After all, back in February 2022, he was certain that he would succeed within a few weeks, after which Ukraine would, in his view, rightly be returned to the Russian fold. His forces were assured that Zelensky’s rag-tag army would quickly surrender and that Russia’s victorious troops would be showered with flowers by a grateful nation as they marched triumphantly through the streets of Kyiv. As the world now knows, this was pure self-delusion, and Putin is now facing the same awkward question addressed to all leaders who start a war: who, exactly, is going to fight it? He is increasingly finding that the answer across Russia is “not me, thanks”.

Young men who do not want to be cannon fodder are once again fleeing Russia. When Putin declared a partial mobilisation in September 2022, six months after ordering the invasion of Ukraine, some 400,000 men fled the country.

This time, people are leaving even without any announcement. No decree, no drama, no televised address. Just a quiet, steady trickle of men who have looked at the odds, done the maths and booked a one-way ticket.

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That should worry the Kremlin far more than any single battlefield setback. A mobilisation order is a shock, and shocks pass. A slow leak of the people you need most is something else entirely.

Authoritarian regimes such as Putin’s are rarely troubled by opinion polls. They tend to be concerned by what people actually do when nobody is watching. And what many Russian men are doing is leaving.

Remember the scenes of September 2022? Within days of the announcement, queues of cars stretched for miles at the borders with Georgia and Kazakhstan. Flights to Istanbul, Yerevan and Belgrade sold out at absurd prices. These were not dissidents or activists. They were programmers, bartenders, delivery drivers and engineers: ordinary men who had never marched against anything but who knew a bad deal when they saw one. What is striking now is that the panic has subsided, but the exodus has not. Nobody needs to be told that the draft is coming. Anyone with eyes can see the enormous casualty lists, the endless funerals in provincial towns, the recruitment adverts plastered at bus stops and the bonuses growing larger every season. A regime that has to keep raising the price of volunteers is a regime that is running out of people willing to sell.

To be fair to the Kremlin, it has been creative. Instead of another sweeping mobilisation, which carries real political risk, it has leaned on cash and other inducements. Regional governments compete by offering signing bonuses that dwarf what a young man in a small city could earn in years. Debts are forgiven, prison sentences are swapped for military service, and migrants are nudged towards recruiting offices with the offer of a Russian passport.