Putin orders increase in size of army amid prospect of long war

MOSCOW • President Vladimir Putin has ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia's armed forces, a reversal of years of efforts by the Kremlin to slim down a bloated military and the latest sign that he is preparing for a long war in Ukraine, where Russia has suffered heavy losses.

The decree, stamped by the President's office and posted on the Kremlin website, raised the target number of active-duty service members by about 137,000, to 1.15 million, by next January, and ordered the government to set aside money to pay for the increase.

It was the first time in five years that Mr Putin had issued an order changing the overall head count of the Russian armed forces.

Officials offered no explanation for the move, and there was little mention of it on state television.

Mr Putin's actions come at a time when he appears as far as ever from his goal of bringing all or most of Ukraine back into the Russian fold, and as his military is struggling with its manpower.

United States officials said Mr Putin's decision is an indication of just how acute those problems remain.

Since the invasion began in February, US and British military officials estimate, Russia has suffered up to 80,000 casualties, including both deaths and injuries.

Those losses and the lack of movement at the front led some analysts to describe the order as a signal that, after six months of fighting, Mr Putin had no plans to relent. "This is not a move that you make when you are anticipating a rapid end to your war," said Ms Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at RAND Corp.

"This is something you do when you are making some kind of plan for a protracted conflict."

Still, military analysts puzzled over how the Russian military, without a major draft and having already tried to tempt and strong-arm potential volunteers, would manage the task of increasing its ranks so sharply.

There is mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine could stretch to next winter and beyond. Russia's offensives in the east and south have slowed to a crawl and neither side has shown any readiness to negotiate or compromise.

In Ukraine, a top security official recently warned that the war's hardest days may still lie ahead.

"It's going to be very difficult; it's not going to be easy," the official, Mr Oleksiy Danilov, who heads the National Security and Defence Council, said in an interview with Radio Liberty, a US-funded independent news organisation.

"And if someone thinks that we have already passed some kind of Rubicon and that the rest will be like clockwork, unfortunately, it will not be."

Analysts said that Mr Putin's decree enlarging the army did not necessarily augur a new draft - something that the Kremlin has apparently tried to avoid in order to maintain a sense of normalcy for much of Russia's population.

Instead, they said, the military could increase the number of young men who are conscripted at any given time for their mandatory year of service, or lengthen the duration of that service.

Some also speculated that the decree could be laying the bureaucratic and budgetary groundwork for incorporating other forces into the military - such as the battalions of "volunteers" now fighting in Ukraine, from Chechnya and other Russian regions.

NYTIMES