German economist Janis Kluge, who analyzes operational reports on the implementation of the Russian budget and based on them draws conclusions about the financing of the war in Ukraine, published on Substack his calculations of the number of contracts concluded with the Ministry of Defense in the second quarter of this year, the BBC commented.
Kluge's conclusions are based on data from regional budgets, which finance large one-time payments or bonuses for new professional soldiers. Since the beginning of the year, many observers, including Kluge, have had the impression that the recruitment rate has fallen and may not cover the large losses on the front. As Kluge's study shows, there was indeed a noticeable decline in the first months of the year, especially in January, but later the pace recovered and stabilized.
Russia does not officially publish such statistics, but the deputy chairman of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, who is responsible for military recruitment, occasionally indicates the number of contract soldiers recruited for a given period.
On July 28, he said that "about 200 thousand people" had been recruited in the first half of the year. On March 27, he indicated the figure of 80 thousand for the first quarter, and on April 30 - 127 thousand since the beginning of the year.
As Kluge writes, the estimates calculated on the basis of regional budgets are about 10% lower than the indicators indicated by Medvedev, but this discrepancy has been observed for a long time. According to his calculations, 93 thousand contracts were concluded in the second quarter, i.e. an average of about 1,000 per day.
This indicator indicates that the need for a new round of forced mobilization is not as acute as many commentators thought, the researcher notes. Of course, quantitative data say nothing about the quality of recruits.
As further evidence that the pace has not slowed down, Kluge cites the words of the head of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov, who on June 18, during a meeting with the president, read out unusually detailed data on the number of contracts signed in his republic over the past four years. From his words "this year we have 12,028. At the moment we have concluded contracts with 5,274 people" it follows that the quotas for the number of professional soldiers are indeed determined centrally. According to Kluge's calculations, they make up approximately 0.3% of the region's population.
The budget figures can be translated into the number of soldiers, as the size of the bonus in each region is widely advertised. In the first half of the year, the average bonus size, calculated based on data from 42 subjects of the Russian Federation, reached a new record of 1.65 million rubles.
Kluge also draws attention to the average bonus size per contract. Since last year, this indicator has grown by 30% and currently amounts to 1.8-1.9 million rubles (about €20,000). This is above the average bonus because regions that pay higher bonuses thus attract applicants from other parts of the country and recruit more soldiers.
Although defense expenditure items in the Russian budget are classified as secret, operational reporting on budget execution is available on the website of the Russian Ministry of Finance.