Unpublished: Putin offers to forgive debts in exchange for recruits to fight in Ukraine

The Russian Armed Forces have not officially made the decision to launch forced recruitment, but measures are being taken that show the difficulties of replacing the casualties caused by a Ukraine that every day better resists Russian forces.

The most reliable data available right now assures that between 2022 and 2025 Russia lost at least 352,000 men in that conflict between dead and missing. Considering so far this year, that figure would have already exceeded the 400,000 men.

The new incentive to go to war it’s economical. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree this Monday by which the Russian State promises to cancel debts of up to 10 million rubles (almost 140,000 dollars at the current exchange rate) to those who agree to enlist in the Army to go fight in Ukraine.

Moscow, according to information available in agency cables, pays attractive salaries to its recruits willing to go to Ukraine, but needs more men to replace those destroyed by the Ukrainian war machine.

The Kremlin’s new idea, already approved by presidential decree, provides that those who sign a military recruitment contract of at least one year, with retroactive effect to May 1they will be able to benefit from this debt forgiveness. Also their spouses.

This debt forgiveness is one of the measures of that decree, which seeks to increase the number of available soldiers without having to approve forced mass mobilizations, which could spark protests.

When the war broke out, Putin promised his population that the “special military operation” (he never called it a war) would be a matter of a few weeks. It’s been four years and almost three months and the fronts have barely moved for at least two years.

President Putin also asks, although he does not make it legally mandatory, to help the social reintegration of war veterans by facilitating their access to employment when they return from war.

Some international agencies, such as Reuters, consider that Putin seeks to reinforce its Army to prepare new offensives and just when peace talks seem stalled. In recent days Moscow informed foreign embassies in kyiv that they had to leave the country because the Russian Armed Forces were going to launch much larger air strikes.

The European ambassadors decided to turn a deaf ear to the Kremlin’s warnings, which they see as a way to intimidate kyiv and its allies. That intimidation is what Putin sought by launching an oreshnishk missile over kyiv over the weekend. It is a device with the capacity to carry dozens of nuclear warheads on a single missile.