Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 20 – Despite the Kremlin’s push to recruit more men to go to Ukraine and fill the depleted ranks of its army there, the city of Moscow, which has never sent a share equal to its percentage of the population sent a quarter fewer men to Ukraine in 2025 than it did a year earlier; and they were of significantly lower quality, a Vyortska investigation finds.
Since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has disproportionately drawn men from impoverished ethnic Russian oblasts and krays and the poor non-Russian republics rather than from the cities where losses among such men might be expected to spark protests.
Given how hard Moscow has been working over the last two years to fill the ranks, it might have been expected that the Russian defense ministry would begin to focus on where the men it might transform into soldiers actually live – large and predominantly ethnic Russian cities like Moscow in the first instance.
But according to Vyorstka, that has not happened. Instead, the trend seems to be going in the other direction with even fewer Muscovites being recruited and dispatched to fight and thus even more from poorer federal subjects beyond the ring road (verstka.media/kogo-rossiya-nabrala-na-vojnu-v-2025-godu).
According to the independent news agency, 24,469 men from Moscow were sent to fight in the war, 25 percent less than in 2024. Worse, many of those who did agree to go were older than those the military wanted or had physical and mental problems that would normally be disqualifying but that in the current environment are not.
Given that the Kremlin regularly claims that it is recruiting ever more men now than in the past, that means that the federal subjects outside the capital must be sending even more, possibly in response to the bonuses their governments are again offering and boosting, a confirmation that the divide between Moscow and the rest of Russia is deepening and widening.
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