In the second quarter of 2025, 37.9 thousand people signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense. This is 2.5 times less than a year ago
Contract recruitment rate falls to two-year low
Date
18 Aug 2025
Author
Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya
Photo: YURI KOCHETKOV / EPA / Scanpix / LETA
In the second quarter of 2025, 37.9 thousand people received payments for concluding a contract with the Ministry of Defense. This follows from data on federal budget expenditures, which were studied by Important Stories.
Compared to the same period in 2024, the number of people joining the Russian army fell by 2.5 times - then 92.8 thousand people received bonuses for signing a contract.
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Taking into account the recruitment
data for the first quarter, 127.5 thousand people received payments for signing a contract in just six months of 2025. For the same period in 2024, 166.2 thousand people received one-time bonuses.
Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev
stated that 210 thousand new contract soldiers joined the Russian army in the first half of 2025. This is 1.6 times more than the federal budget expenditure data shows. The figures announced by the authorities had previously
exceeded the calculations based on the data on one-time payments, but the discrepancy was not that significant.
The number of new recruits in the second quarter of 2025 fell to a two-year low: fewer people joined the Russian army only in the same period of 2023, when Russia had just begun an active campaign to attract contract soldiers for money.
It is unclear what exactly the decrease is related to. In particular, the assessment by Janis Kluge, a research fellow at the German Institute for International Security Studies,
does not show a decline. According to his calculations, 191,000 people could have signed a contract in the first six months of 2025 — one and a half times more than is shown by federal data. This assessment is based on information on payments for concluding a contract from regional budgets and allows one to assess the recruitment rate without a time lag. The data is available for 37 regions and is extrapolated to all of Russia.
Some regions reported problems with recruiting contract soldiers. For example, the authorities of the Irkutsk region cannot fulfill the plan for attracting people to the Russian army due to a lack of money to increase bonuses for signing a contract, the publication "People of Baikal"
reported . The authorities of the Vladimir region
have stopped reporting on the number of recruits sent to the front, although they have done so regularly since 2023. In early July, the region
increased the one-time payment for signing a contract.