A Truly Disturbing Proposal: Putin Calls for Filling Depleted Ranks of Police with Veterans of His Expanded War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 4 – For several years, Russian officials have sounded the alarm that the country suffers from a shortage of policemen given that low salaries, poor working conditions, and the possibility of making more money either by volunteering to serve in the army or joining private security companies have led more to resign than force has been able to hire.

            In some places, especially at the local level outside of Moscow, as many as 40 percent of the positions in the police are currently unfilled, forcing the remaining offers to work overtime and meaning that the police force often lacks the personnel need to combat crime and especially its more serious and violent categories.

            Vladimir Putin has proposed a solution, one that might lead to a filling of the ranks of the police but that should concern all worried about crime fighting and the rule of law (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/03/04/s-ikh-psikhologicheskoi-zakalkoi-putin-predlozhil-zakryvat-defitsit-kadrov-v-politsii-za-schet-uchastnikov-voennykh-deistvii-v-ukraine-news).

            Speaking to the collegium of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of which the police is a part, the Kremlin leader said that he favored recruiting police from among the veterans because “their combat experience and psychological and physical training” makes them serious candidates for the police (vedomosti.ru/politics/news/2026/03/04/1180679-putin-v-strukturi).

            There are at least three serious problems with this idea. First, the police and the military have fundamentally different purposes and pursue those purposes in fundamentally different ways. Suggesting that the approach of one will work well in the other fails to take these differences into account.

            Second, many of the returning veterans suffer from the brutality of combat and the presence in their midst of criminals who agreed to serve in the military to get their sentences commuted, experiences that mean many veterans are hardly good candidates to enforce the law in a humane way. They are thus likely to be more disposed to use violence than current officers.

            And third, a major reason the Russian police can’t hold officers is that pay is so low. For returning veterans, the difference between the money they were getting to fight in Ukraine and that they would receive for joining the police is so large that few are likely to want to join and those that do may be even more inclined to engage in corrupt practices than police already there.

            Putin’s proposal in this regard may go nowhere, but his readiness to suggest this idea indicates that he doesn’t fully understand any of these problems or alternatively and even more worrisome, he wants a police force of the future to be far more willing to use violence than even the Russian police are now.