Russian President Vladimir Putin issues decree boosting Russian army troops to 1.5 million

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the country’s military to increase its number of troops by 180,000 to a total of 1.5 million, as Moscow’s military action in Ukraine drags on for more than two and a half years.

The presidential decree, published on the official government website, will take effect on 1 December.

It sets the overall number of Russian military personnel at nearly 2.4 million — including 1.5 million troops — and orders the government to provide the necessary funding.

In June, Putin said the number of troops involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine was nearly 700,000, or more than half of all active soldiers.

The previous increase in Russian troop numbers came last December, when a decree by Putin set the total number of Russian military personnel at about 2.2 million, including 1.32 million troops.

After calling up 300,000 reservists in the face of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, Russian authorities have switched to filling the ranks of troops fighting in Ukraine with volunteer soldiers, who have been attracted by relatively high wages.

Many commentators have noted that the Kremlin has been reluctant to call more reservists, fearing an adverse reaction similar to the one in 2022 when hundreds of thousands fled Russia to avoid being sent to combat.

The shortage of military personnel has been widely cited as a key reason behind the success of Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region launched on 6 August.

The Kremlin has sought to avoid redeploying troops from eastern Ukraine — where Moscow’s army has been on an offensive, making incremental but steady gains in the past few months — and relied on reinforcements from other areas to stem the incursion.

The Russian Defence Ministry on Monday reported reclaiming control of two more villages in the Kursk region from Ukrainian forces. Euronews could not independently confirm these claims.