The Russian Army: Personnel

Nadin Brzezinski
8 min readFeb 13, 2024

We must look again at the Russian army because the RUAF has personnel issues. And let’s face it, nobody will do a forced mobilization until the election.

So, let’s first deal with conscripts. Theoretically, they are not supposed to be close to the front lines. Given that Ukrainian sabotage groups are freely entering Russian territory in places like Belgorod, that is slowly becoming a gray zone.

So here, via Volymedia:

Russian conscripts suffer losses and are wounded, but are not participants in hostilities

The Russian army has been using conscripts since the first day of the invasion of Ukraine. They were used to supplement personnel units that lacked contract soldiers. They were either weakly accepted or persuaded by threats to sign contracts (many signed contracts for the sake of money, and not just out of fear of reprisals).

Vladimir Putin* and Sergei Shoigu tirelessly repeated in the Russian media that conscripts are not used in combat. They repeat this now. At the same time, conscripts continue to regularly end up in the combat zone, die or receive wounds and shell shock.

According to Russian officers located on the line of combat contact, there are almost no conscript soldiers right now on the front line; they are located in the immediate rear.

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Nadin Brzezinski

Historian by training. Former day to day reporter. Sometimes a geek who enjoys a good miniatures game. You can find me at CounterSocial, Mastodon and rarely FB