March 23, 2026: The Russian war in Ukraine has become unpopular with most Russians. From the beginning, few Russians were interested in volunteering to join the military and fight in Ukraine. Russian recruiters soon discovered that poor rural Russians were willing to take a chance as a soldier in Ukraine if the financial inducements were high enough. Last year nearly $8 billion was spent on signing bonuses for new soldiers. Over 95 percent of the soldiers came from poor rural areas where the bonuses could buy more than in a major city. These bonuses were life-changing for many rural families. Once a rural soldier was killed, wife or parents received up to $100,000.

There is one critical flaw in this compensation system. The rural soldiers, especially from particularly poor regions, are not trained, treated or used as professional soldiers, but as highly expendable men used in expensive, in the number of casualties suffered, operations. The government or media praise these dead soldiers received is that they, as rural men, often from ethnic communities that were once known as fierce warriors. The poverty and lack of economic opportunities is rarely mentioned.

Even with all this money spent on recruiting, after four years of war in Ukraine and over 1.3 million soldiers killed, disabled or missing in combat, Russia is having problems recruiting soldiers. Russia was able to recruit 400,000 last year and expects to do the same this year. In the last two years, new recruits were often foreigners, including South Americans, Cubans, Africans and many countries in Asia. Recruiting standards have been lowered in Russia, where prisons have been emptied and alcoholics, drug addicts and the mentally ill have been induced, tricked or forced to sign a contract to join the military. Recruiters have been particularly successful in rural Russia where good jobs are scarce and alcoholism is rampant. Recruiters will sometimes visit a venue that serves alcohol and buy drinks for likely new recruits. Once these inebriated men have signed, the recruiter will often have to enlist local police to go where the new soldiers lived and tell the now sober men that they are in the army and take them away. Soldiers recruited in this way are not expected to last long in Ukraine, so their physical or mental condition is not important.

Recruiters have other problems to deal with. Twenty years ago, Russian leaders were informed that the rapidly aging Russian population was not only shrinking but was not fit for any major economic or military efforts. Some 60 percent of Russians were elderly, children, or disabled. Out of 20 million males of working age, one million were in prison, a million in the armed forces, five million were unemployed or unemployable due to poor education, health or attitude, four million were chronic alcoholics, and a million were drug addicts. Thus, there is something of a labor shortage, with plenty of jobs for women and immigrants. The birth rate is below replacement level, and a declining population needs more immigrants just to keep things going. Improving medical care, and health habits, especially treating alcoholism and drug use, was a government priority, in order to raise the lifespan of Russian males. All of this made the idea of a smaller all-volunteer military more attractive. Too many of the current troops were drunks, addicted to drugs or just unreliable. Volunteers must be paid much more, but their discipline is much higher. Russian officers are very impressed with what the British, Japanese and Americans have done with all-volunteer armed forces and want to emulate them. That never happened.