Dara Massicot
Introduction
Prior to the Russian government’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military spent nearly 20 years trying to recruit, train, and retain a more proficient and professional military. The government allocated billions of rubles to improve military service conditions and to raise the prestige of military service through programs that included overhauling training programs; improving service conditions; modernizing the force with new or improved equipment; instituting measures to reduce corruption, hazing, and criminality; and offering more-attractive incentives, such as competitive wages, housing, and other social benefits, to officers and professional enlisted personnel.
Russian civilian and military leaders believed that these efforts increased military proficiency and improved the prestige of military service. On the basis of some metrics, this belief was not groundless. In the years prior the 2022 invasion, the Russian military was able—for the first time in its history—to count more professional enlisted personnel in its ranks than sources.3 Of those casualties, an estimated 47,000 to 60,000 Russian personnel have been killed in action; official information from Moscow almost certainly undercounts those deaths (around 6,000). Russian casualties from 18 months of war now exceed the number of casualties from a decade of war in Afghanistan or two campaigns in Chechnya in the 1990s.4 Already by September 2022, personnel losses were so severe that the Kremlin was forced to order a partial mobilization of 300,000 people.
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