According to Western officials whose assessments were shared with The Guardian, Russia continues to wage its war against Ukraine under conditions of a structural manpower deficit: monthly combat losses exceed the number of new soldiers the army is able to recruit by roughly 6,000. According to the same data, over the past two months Moscow has been ramping up recruitment — around a thousand people per day — yet even this pace has proved insufficient to offset the killed and wounded on the front line.
Replacement shortfall at the front
As one Western official notes, the gap between those lost in combat and those recruited now stands at about 6,000 per month. In his words, Vladimir Putin's response to such losses has been further escalation of the conflict and intensified strikes on Ukraine's civilian infrastructure, rather than a build-up of manpower. The publication's Western sources assess the Kremlin's ability to compensate for heavy battlefield losses through additional recruitment as limited.
Escalation of strikes on the energy sector
In particular, since the beginning of July Russia has, by available estimates, launched more than 360 missiles at Ukraine, exploiting Kyiv's shortage of air-defence systems. According to the publication's source, Moscow is trying to break the morale of Ukrainian society by destroying energy infrastructure ahead of the winter period. This course is seen as part of a strategy of pressure on the population and on Western governments.
Risks of a new mobilisation
At the same time, a new large-scale mobilisation could pose a serious political and economic risk for the Kremlin, The Guardian writes. After the previous mobilisation in autumn 2022, around one million people left Russia, a significant share of them highly qualified specialists; fewer than half of them subsequently returned. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the Russian army can absorb several hundred thousand new soldiers: among the problems cited are shortages of equipment and officer corps.
War of attrition and pressure on the West
Western officials believe that Russia is continuing a war of attrition, counting on the gradual weakening of support for Ukraine by its allies. In Moscow, in their view, there may be a reliance on the fact that threats and intimidation will heighten public anxiety in European countries and influence their governments' decisions. At the same time, despite the continued real threat, the Kremlin is expected to seek to avoid direct confrontation with NATO. One official noted that hostile rhetoric is consistent with Russia's long-standing military doctrine aimed at exploiting the enemy's fears; at the same time, Moscow retains the ability to harm the United Kingdom, including through cyberattacks or physical attacks on civilian targets by agents, although, by estimates, Putin will try to limit such actions so as not to provoke a more direct conflict with NATO. It is worth recalling that, according to Ukrainian intelligence, Vladimir Putin could order troops to invade NATO territory within the next few years, while US President Donald Trump recently stated that he is not concerned by the threat of a Russian attack on alliance countries.
Contradictory figures
In Ukrainian media publications citing The Guardian, there are differing formulations of the scale of the problem. In the main version, conveyed by Western officials, the figure is a monthly gap of about 6,000 people between losses and recruitment, at a recruitment rate of around a thousand per day. However, a number of outlets (in particular, headlines on rbc.ua) frame the topic as "losses six times higher than the number mobilised," which is a different quantitative frame and does not match the monthly figure of 6,000. The discrepancy is likely due to different time windows and counting methodologies (recruitment versus mobilisation versus total combat losses), so both versions should be regarded as non-matching estimates of the same process.
