Putin orders Russian army to be second largest after China's, with 1.5 million troops
President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the regular size of Russia's military to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active-duty troops, a move that would make it the world's second-largest after China's.
In a decree posted on the Kremlin's website, Putin ordered the total size of the armed forces to be increased to 2.38 million people, of whom, he said, 1.5 million should be active military personnel.
According to data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading military think tank, such an increase would put Russia overtaking the United States and India in terms of the number of active combat troops it has and second only to China in terms of size. The IISS said Beijing has just over two million active-duty troops.
The move, the third time Putin has expanded the army's ranks since sending his military into Ukraine in February 2022, comes as Russian forces advance in eastern Ukraine on parts of a vast 1,000-kilometer (627-mile) front line and try to push Ukrainian forces out of Russia's Kursk region.
Although Russia has a population three times larger than Ukraine's and has been successfully recruiting volunteers on lucrative contracts to fight in Ukraine, like kyiv's forces, it has been suffering heavy losses on the battlefield and there are no signs of the war ending anytime soon.
Both sides say the exact size of their losses is a military secret.
Andrei Kartapolov, chairman of the defence committee in Russia's lower house of parliament, said the increase in the number of active troops was part of a plan to overhaul the armed forces and gradually increase their size to match what he described as the current international situation and the behaviour of “our former foreign partners”.
“For example, we now need to form new military structures and units to ensure security in the north-west (of Russia) since Finland, which we border on, has joined the NATO bloc,” Kartapolov told Parlamentskaya Gazeta, the internal newspaper of the Russian parliament.
“And to carry out this process, we need to increase the number of troops.”
Third increase since 2022
Starting in 2022, Putin had previously ordered two official increases in the number of combat troops: by 137,000 and 170,000 respectively.
Russia also mobilized more than 300,000 troops in September and October 2022 in an exercise that caused tens of thousands of military-age men to flee the country.
The Kremlin has said, however, that no new mobilization is planned for now and that the idea is to continue to rely on volunteers who enlist to fight in Ukraine.
Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, questioned whether Moscow was willing to pay for the increase in active-duty troops.
“There are ways to staff a permanent force of 1.5 million men, but the Kremlin will not like them if they actually have to deal with what it requires,” Massicot wrote in X.
“Are they really able to increase the defense budget to sustain acquisitions and this requirement?”
Massicot, who published a report on Russia's efforts to regenerate its military, said Moscow could take the unpopular and difficult decision of expanding the size of the draft or changing the law to allow more women to serve in the military to achieve that goal.
“There is a need to look for signs that this is a real initiative to recruit and expand, and not some kind of show to intimidate others. The current method of volunteering works, but it has its limitations. This (expansion) means more expenses and more tensions,” he said.
