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Written by Ben Spencer
Edited by Michael Hilliard
As the war in Ukraine grinds into its third year, Russia’s manpower strategies have evolved significantly, with the Kremlin's initial reliance on young patriots and elite formations slowly degrading toward a force increasingly composed of older recruits, civilians with no prior military experience, and ethnic minorities drawn from the country’s far-flung republics. From report, this shift in the average Russian recruit has been driven by mounting battlefield attrition and the need to sustain offensive operations, giving outside observers an objective data point on the changing nature of Russia’s war effort.
The Aging Army
According to figures from Mediazona, as of January 2025, of the approximately 88,000 Russian soldiers lost in Ukraine, 23% of these casualties were contract soldiers. The majority of the recruits from that time period reportedly being civilians with no previous military background, joining the war for a wide variety of reasons. This statistic becomes important to understand, as it marks a significant increase from the rate back in November 2023, when only 14% of Russian casualties came from this category. As in the war’s early months, it was predominantly Russia’s airborne and special operations units (SOF) absorbing a disproportionate share of casualties, with Moscow throwing some of its more capable units into battles around cities like Bakhmut and Mariupol. While tactically successful, these efforts would come at a high cost in the long run, as the loss of some of these better-trained and more experienced units would often require Moscow to replace them with older, far less experienced recruits, some of whom had only two weeks of range training before being sent into the gauntlet in Ukraine.
While this drop in operator quality has become obvious throughout some sections of the front, equally striking is the change in the average age of Russian troops deployed to Ukraine. As while in the initial months of the war the average age of soldiers fighting in Ukraine was 20, this figure has now risen to 36. We can see examples of this from the likes of Vadim Shishimarin, a 24-year-old Russian tank commander, sentenced to 15 years in jail in May 2022 for killing a Ukrainian civilian and the first to be sentenced for war crimes in Ukraine.
By 2025 though, reports of captured Russian’s now appear to be far older than the comparatively young Vadim, with the Ukrainain’s showcasing captures like Stanislav Simonov, a 51-year-old metalworker from Bashkortostan recently killed in action., one of Russia’s most casualty-heavy regions recently killed in action. Siminov, a man who would have been prime fighting age during the previous Russian campaigns into Chechnya, rather than Ukraine, likely joined for the significantly inflated recruitment bonuses currently being offered back home. (Something you can read more about in Part 1 of this series here)
Stanislav and Bashkortostan exemplify the regional burden of Moscow’s recruitment drive, with the republic not only offering some of the highest enlistment bonuses in Russia, but also recording some of the highest casualty rates of any Oblast or republic in the country. According to BBC Russian Service, eight out of ten Russian casualties from Bashkortostan come from villages rather than major urban centers, reinforcing this growing disproportionate reliance on rural recruits to fill the line in Ukraine.
Recruiting Older Civilians: A Strategic Necessity
These shifting recruitment targets are also being reflected in the Kremlin’s propaganda campaigns, with the recruitment ads of 2025 now being aimed at an entirely different set of Russians compared to the ads aired in 2022. The video posted below is a recruitment video released by the Russian Ministry of Defence in December of 2022, the first winter of the war.
(Figure 2: Russian Recruitment Ad: "You are a man, be one!")
From analysis, the advert appears to be primarily aimed at middle-aged men working in occupations traditionally considered “low-status” in Russian society, particularly fitness trainers, taxi drivers and security guards. The ad openly mocked these professions, questioning whether such men had truly “found their strength” in life. The advert openly characterising these jobs and the men doing them as uninspiring with questions like “Is this really your strength?” and “Did you really want to choose this path?’’ This recruitment, a far cry from the patriotic adventuring seen in recruitment ads being aired right after the February invasion, coincided with Russia’s major offensives toward Bakhmut, where battlefield casualties soared, and therefore, so did the need to replenish forces. It was also around this time that the average casualty age began to rise from being around 20 in February to now being around 30-32 in December.
With younger Russians beginning to hear of the high casualties returning from Ukraine and volunteer numbers starting to drop, the Kremlin turned to a September mobilisation to bring in younger recruits. Newly targeted advertising campaigns, like the one showcased above, aimed to attract slightly older recruits. However, as battlefield casualties soared later in the year, economic incentives became the primary lure. Middle-aged men, often struggling to support their families amid persistently high consumer inflation and a devaluing rouble, were drawn to volunteering by the high salaries and signing bonuses that far exceeded their civilian earnings.This trend being grimly exhibited by Olesya Gerasimenko of Verstka magazine, having interviewed numerous recruits at Moscow’s Butyrsky military recruitment center in October 2024, reporting that most of these new enlistees were fathers, motivated by financial stability rather than patriotism.
Targeting of Ethnic Groups
Beyond shifting its recruiting targeting toward older men, Moscow has also begun turning to ethnic minorities and migrants to sustain its growing war effort. As seen in the recruitment ad from August 2024, the Russian Ministry of Defense has begun emphasising new themes of religious, linguistic and cultural unity, claiming that regardless of faith, soldiers “know that God is on their side.” The video prominently displaying a list of ethnic groups, including Tatars, Bashkirs, and even Ukrainians, an unsubtle nod to Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine and Russia are “one people.”
The timing of this campaign is particularly notable, as it aired just as Ukrainian forces launched their incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The Kremlin’s messaging in the advert, already targeting a group being recruited in disproportionately high numbers, served a dual purpose for Moscow. While it aimed to attract more recruits from regions struggling with elevated unemployment and inflation, it also sought to reassure ethnic Russians from key urban centres like Moscow and St. Petersburg that the burden of the war would fall primarily on the nation’s rural and non-Slavic minorities, rather than on the children of the wealthier middle class.
The “New Heroes of Russia” Propaganda Campaign
Moscow’s evolving recruitment efforts are also reflected in its public imagery surrounding the war, with propaganda billboards from 2022 primarily featuring Slavic officers in dress uniforms. Whereas, by 2023, domestic politics had become far more important in Moscow’s decision-making progress, with those stereotypical Moscovite Russians being replaced by images of more diverse soldiers from across the country, now clad in wartime field gear. This change in iconography also extends to the language of the ads as well, with the early slogan of “Glory to the Heroes of Russia” morphing into the more ambiguous “Heroes of a Great Country,” subtly broadening the scope of recruitment beyond ethnic Russians. If we dive deeper into some of the recruitment ads from that period, we can also see these same ethnic groups being directly spoken to by the Kremlin. Where by using the Wayback Machine we can see the Russian government’s ads targeting groups in places like Bahkortistan changing over the 2023 - 2025 period.
Over the past year in particular, Russia’s military recruitment strategy has undergone a significant transformation, shifting away from ideological appeals toward a more transactional approach, both in how much Moscow is willing to pay, and who Moscow is offering these deals to.As whilst monthly salaries for contract soldiers in regions like Bashkortostan have risen by a modest 8% over ten months, this is far below the 30% increase seen in Moscow. Instead, for the rural areas of the country like Bashkortistan, one-time enlistment bonuses have skyrocketed from 204,000 rubles to 2 million rubles, marking a staggering 880% increase. For context, this sum is nearly 50 times the average monthly salary in the region, which stands at 46,751 rubles. By comparison, Moscow’s one-time enlistment payment, though higher at 2.3 million rubles, represents only a 17-fold increase over the city's 135,000-ruble average monthly salary.
The Kremlin’s recruitment patterns reflect a fundamental transformation in Russia’s military composition. Once dominated by career soldiers from elite units, the Russian war effort now increasingly relies on middle-aged civilian recruits, ethnic minorities, and men from economically struggling regions. Bashkortostan’s skyrocketing enlistment incentives and casualty rates highlight this trend, as do the Kremlin’s deliberate efforts to shield urban Russians from the draft. However, this strategy is not without risk. The rising age of recruits and reliance on minimally trained troops suggest a force that is increasingly hollowed out. While Moscow has thus far avoided another mass mobilisation, fearing public backlash—the reality on the ground is making that position harder to maintain. With Ukrainian forces bringing the war closer to Russia’s heartland through drone strikes and cross-border raids, the Kremlin’s ability to sustain the illusion of a distant conflict is fraying.
If Russia’s casualty rates continue on their current trajectory, the Kremlin may soon face an even starker choice: mobilise a reluctant urban population or double down on its reliance on the country’s periphery. Either option comes with significant risks, and the longer the war drags on, the more difficult it will be for Moscow to maintain its current recruitment strategy without wider domestic repercussions.
This article is part two, of our three part series unpacking the shifting dynamics in Russia’s recruitment strategy.
Ben Spencer is a research analyst for the Red Line, specialising in the events of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the modern Russian military.
