Vladimir Putin’s ukasz was published early in the afternoon on Monday, September 16. For the third time since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Russian head of state has ordered a sharp increase in the size of the army. As of December 1, 2024, the total number of troops must be increased to 2,389,000, an increase of 180,000. August 2022, December 2023 and September 2024: these three presidential decrees bring the cumulative increase to 500,000 men.
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With our correspondent in Moscow, Anissa El Jabri
” Russia to become world’s second largest army “, headlines the online media Lenta. It relies for this calculation on the data of the portal Globalfirepower. After the entry into force of the presidential decree, the numbers of the Russian army should, according to this site, exceed those of India and the United States, placing it just behind China which claims a little more than 2 million soldiers.
Where will the Ministry of Defense find these troops? Not through conscripts or a new mobilization, he promises. The government still does not want to take the risk of antagonizing its population.
The army therefore promises to continue to use contract volunteers. Bonuses and salaries have exploded this summer, but the price is no object. Vladimir Putin ” instructs the Russian government to provide the Ministry of Defense with the necessary funds for the implementation ” of his decree. What matters, again and again, is the mother of all battles, the war in Ukraine.
The chairman of the Duma Defense Committee, Andrei Kartapolov, clarified: ” This is mainly due to the fact that the situation is changing around our borders. Finland has joined NATO. It is necessary to form new formations of military units, this requires personnel. »
Asked last June in Saint Petersburg by international press agencies about the absence of a recent official report on losses of the Russian army, Vladimir Putin had simply stated that they were ” several times lower ” to those of Ukraine.
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