Russian Army to Add 180,000 Soldiers, 1 Year Ahead of Schedule

Russian soldiers march toward Red Square to attend a Victory Day military parade marking the 78th anniversary of the end of World War II, in Moscow on May 9, 2023, Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian army to grow by 180,000 troops for a total force of 1.5 million soldiers.

The order, which was published in a decree on the Kremlin’s website, will take effect on Dec. 1 and appears to show Moscow speeding up its plans to increase the size of its military.

In January 2023, then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced plans to increase the number of troops to 1.5 million by 2026.

But in May this year, Putin appointed Shoigu, 69, as secretary of the Security Council and named Andrei Belousov, 65, as defense minister.

In June, Putin said that about 700,000 Russian troops were involved in the conflict in Ukraine.

The Russian Defence Ministry has said its troops have retaken the villages of Uspenovka and Borki in the Kursk region, after Ukrainian forces began a surprise incursion into Russian territory in August.

The Kremlin decree says the total number in the Russian armed forces—including navy, air force, and special forces—will be 2.4 million, of whom 1.5 million will be in the army.

In December 2023, Putin ordered a similar edict, setting the total number of Russian military personnel at 2.2 million.

In February 2022, Putin ordered his troops to carry out a “special military operation” in Ukraine, which involved invading northern and eastern Ukraine in an attempt to seize the capital, Kyiv, and oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

But after failing to achieve the overthrow of Zelenskyy and the defeat of the Ukrainian army, the Russians pulled troops out of the Kyiv and Kharkiv areas in September 2022 and focused them more on the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in the east.

About 300,000 reservists were called up when Ukraine started a counteroffensive in the fall of 2022.

Hundreds of thousands of young Russian men also fled the country to avoid being conscripted.

There have also been unconfirmed reports that Russia has freed inmates—including convicted murderers—from prison on the condition that they fight on the front line.

The conflict was then at a stalemate for almost a year, until the Ukrainians withdrew some of their forces from the Donetsk front line and sent them into Russia on Aug. 6.

That move, which initially appeared to be bold and successful, has weakened the front line around Pokrovsk, and the resurgent Russians have advanced to within five miles of the city.

Crunch Battle Around Pokrovsk

Russian forces now appear poised to capture the strategic town of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistics hub often described in the Russian media as the “gateway to Donetsk.”

Pokrovsk, which has a major railroad station, sits at the intersection of several supply routes linking it to other contested towns in the region, including Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, and Kostiantynivka.

Tim Ripley, a prominent British defense analyst, told The Epoch Times in a previous interview that he believed that the Ukrainians in Pokrovsk could hold on for only a couple of weeks.

He said Russian forces in the Donbas are using a time-tested strategy through which enemy troops are outflanked before being corralled into inescapable “cauldrons.”

On Sept. 13, Zelenskyy said the Kursk incursion had slowed Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

But Putin has said the Kursk offensive weakened Ukraine’s defenses on the front line.

Over the weekend, Russia and Ukraine conducted two prisoner exchanges, involving hundreds of prisoners of war.

Most of the Russian soldiers had been captured in the Kursk region.

Estimates of the total Russian casualties during the Ukraine war vary wildly.

A July 2023 study suggested that 47,000 Russian troops had been killed up until that point, which was more than the Soviet death toll during the whole of the 1979–1989 occupation of Afghanistan.

The study was conducted by journalists at the Russian independent news sites Meduza and Mediazona with statistician Dmitry Kobak from the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Ankur Narayan, British counselor at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said that as of May, 465,000 Russian personnel have been killed or wounded in Ukraine.

Russia has strongly disputed such casualty figures.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.