Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 7 – In the past year, the number of Russia’s federal subjects using bounty hunters to sign up contract soldiers for Putin’s war in Ukraine has almost doubled from a year ago to 56 now and the amount these bounty hunters are paid had increased by as much a 1000 percent, The Moscow Times reports.
Of those regions and republics employing this method of boosting recruitment, the paper says, 38 are doing so by the actions of government agencies, while in the 18 others, these payments are handled privately through recruitment agencies” (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/07/esli-verbovka-ne-srabotaet-budet-mobilizatsiya-dve-treti-rossiiskih-regionov-nachali-platit-ohotnikam-za-kontraktnikami-a202907).
This system allows the governors to say that there is no federal money being spent and that even the amount of regional money is relatively small; but there is no question that the federal subjects are under enormous pressure to spend it even if they have to cut other spending and that the leaders of these subjects are now pressuring businesses to bear some of the burden.
This system varies from one region to another, the paper continues. “Some offer a reward to anyone who brings in a contract soldier while others do so only if public sector employees are involved” – and in some places such rewards go only to employees of the siloviki.
On the one hand, The Moscow Times suggests, this effort highlights the Kremlin’s increasing difficulty the government is having in raising enough men to replace the thinning ranks of Russian forces in Ukraine and the ways the regions have been roped in to ensuring that the flow of men continues.
But on the other, despite the enormous amount of money sometimes mentioned, experts with whom the newspaper spoke say that even the hard-pressed regions have enough money to continue this arrangement for some time, even to the point of increasing rewards to bounty hunters and the soldiers themselves.
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