Desperate recruitment measures force Kremlin to use amputees in combat roles.

Today, there is interesting news from inside Russia itself.

Here, Putin has now signed a decree allowing category D reservists to serve in air defense units in the Russian rear. Extraordinarily, category D reservists include those deemed unfit for military service due to loss of limbs. Soldiers who have lost a leg, arm, or other part of their body, in any way deemed unfit for frontline service, will now be used to operate complex air defense equipment used to take down Ukrainian drones and missiles in the Russian rear. The decree also allows these men to serve in Russian Bars units, officially meant to serve as reservists in the rear, but have been frequently deployed to frontline combat, most notably during the Ukrainian Zaporizhia and Kursk counteroffensives.

The decree to allow amputees to serve in combat roles either on the frontline or in the rear is reflective of the utmost desperation within the Russian Ministry of Defense, which had appealed to Putin to sign the decree. Russian recruitment numbers are at an all-time low since the full-scale invasion began, while Russian losses are reaching record highs. Most importantly, while Russia is recruiting an average of one-thousand contract soldiers a day, daily Russian losses are reaching an average of one-thousand-three-hundred, resulting in an average recruitment shortage of three-hundred men a day, or nine-thousand men each month.

Experts believe that after the upcoming Russian parliamentary elections on the twentieth of September this year, Putin will announce a new wave of mobilization. While the legitimacy of Russian elections is frequently cast into doubt by accusations of corruption and fraud, they continue to be a historic primer for civil unrest and political protests. After the last Russian mobilization caused major unrest in itself, Putin fears he needs to delay the official announcement of the next round till after the elections, to avoid the two mutually reinforcing each other and cause civil unrest to become unmanageable. Still, major Russian media channels are already psychologically preparing the Russian public for a new round of mobilization, discussing why it is necessary and how it would solve the problems causing the lack of results in Russia’s special military operation.

Still, it is important to note that Russian mobilization never officially ended after Putin first announced it in September of two-thousand-twenty-two. After meeting the stated goal of three-hundred-thousand new recruits, the efforts took a quieter and more clandestine role; using deceptive practices like offering students rear-area or technical jobs only to send them to assault roles instead; making foreigners who do not speak Russian sign work or residency contracts that later turn out to be defense contracts; all the way to straight-up beatings and torture of young men doing their obligatory year of military service to force them to sign full service contracts with the army.

Most notably, military analysts report that while Russian recruitment initially mainly relied on the high signing bonuses, which currently stand at thirty-thousand euros, it has increasingly been forced to rely on forced methods such as these instead; with recruiters having recently begun raiding factory floors to arrest workers, and then forcing them to sign contracts under threat of beatings for being cowards or being pro-Ukraine. These tactics become even more abhorrent when understanding that the average time between a soldier signing a contract with the Russian army and being killed in Ukraine currently stands at ten to twenty days; a process that is now widely documented and followed through Russian soldiers’ social media activity and them going offline for good.

Overall, while Russian mobilization never formally ended, a new official announcement will allow the already aggressive recruitment practices to take place more in the open, and at a much larger scale. The practice of now allowing actual amputees to serve in reservist and air defense units will not just result in obvious failed performances against Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on the Russian rear, but it is also a sign of how desperate the situation has grown for Putin, seeking to bridge the gap till elections are concluded, with the Russian military trying to crawl itself past the finish line, but now with arms and legs missing.