Moscow’s armed forces personnel managers tasked with replacing combat losses in the Russo-Ukrainian War are targeting residents of the country’s poorer and more remote regions, reducing recruiting standards and widening the definition of fit for Russian military service, according to recent independent news reports from inside the country, corroborated by Ukrainian military intelligence.

Advertisements for service in the Russian national security troops BARS have exploded, particularly in Russian regions with weaker economies and higher unemployment, following the Kremlin’s Monday approval of a new law authorizing the mobilization of reservists to “protect rear area facilities,” the independent Russian news agency Important Stories (IS) reported on Wednesday.

New BARS job listings in the provincial Volga basin Tartarstan, Ufa and Bashkorstan regions are offering monthly reservist salary payments of 10,000 rubles/month ($123.04)and up to 76,000 rubles ($935) bonus for initial contract signing and training, to men willing to volunteer and able to pass induction checks, the IS article said.

In Russia’s Irkutsk region, a Siberian territory about twice the size of Sweden with a population of 2.3 million, Russian armed forces induction teams are passing as suitable for service residents with tuberculosis, HIV, and hepatitis – in past years these were all illnesses disqualifying a man from military service, the independent local news platform Liudi Baikala (LB) reported, citing recruiting ads published in local media by authorities.

Recruiting ads targeting men with HIV or hepatitis also were placed in work-search platforms serving the remote Siberian Kemerovo region, and the western Voronezh region, the Tuesday LB report said.

Volunteers with such illnesses would take the field in units isolated from healthy soldiers, and once in a “chronic illness” unit, a volunteer faced a probable 90% chance of serving as assault troops, the LB report said, citing an Irkutsk recruiting official. Advertisements for HIV- and hepatitis-positive recruits also have appeared in the Volga River basin cities Ufa, Vologda, Ufa, Nizhniy Novogorod, and Cheboksary.

The LB report questioned the honesty of a promise made by an Irkutsk recruiter suggesting to a journalist posing as a potential recruit that a man signing a Russian army contract would be guaranteed a rear area job.

The IS article, likewise, questioned the honesty of a recruitment official promising a new Russian reservist would not see combat – pointing out that Ukrainian forces invading Russia’s Kursk region in 2024 are still there; and by Russian law, reservists may be deployed to fight there.

In Russia’s central Siberian Irkutsk region, the number of people willing to sign a contract and go to war in Ukraine has, in 2025, probably fallen by half compared to 2024, the independent Liudi Baikala (LB) news and analysis platform reported on Monday, citing recruiting data from three towns published by local authorities. The Irkutsk Region is “among the worst (recruiting) performers because it was unable to increase the pay for signing a contract,” the article said.

Service in Russia’s assault forces is among the most dangerous jobs on either side in the Russo-Ukraine War, with combat losses regularly reported above 70% in a single attack, and in some cases exceeding 90%. The worst casualties are suffered during assaults by poorly trained troops through minefields covered by Ukrainian mortars, artillery, bomber unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones.

Russia’s national leadership ordered a limited mobilization of reserves in October 2022 to replace unexpectedly heavy losses suffered in Ukraine, but since then has avoided expanding conscription or pushing residents of major cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Krasnodar to contribute men to the fighting.

According to Kremlin official announcements, Russia’s primary recruiting goal for 2025 is to enlist around 32,000 new soldiers a month, with a focus on “voluntary contracts” rather than full-scale mobilization is being met.

The campaign to find men for the military has been nationwide but has most targeted regions with higher unemployment and poorer economies. In summer 2025, total bonus and incentive payments in the relatively wealthy, high-employment Samara region had spiked to 3.6 million rubles ($44,300).

But stalling economic growth and weakening government revenues have reduced bonus values in most of Russia’s regions, with poorer and more remote regions hardest hit.

Compared to summer, according to Kyiv Post research, bonuses offered in the Volga River’s Nizhniy Novororod region had fallen from 1,800,000 rubles ($22,150) to 800,000 rubles ($9,850), in the Ural Mountain Ulyanovsk region from 2,000,000 rubles ($24,620) to 800,000 rubles ($9,850), and in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenets region from 1,400,000 rubles ($17,230) to 800,000 rubles ($9,850).

In Russia’s Far Eastern Republic of Sakha Region (Yakutia), one of Russia’s poorest territories, authorities have only been able to meet 40% of recruitment targets set by the Kremlin, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency HUR reported in an Oct. 22-published analysis citing internal Russian Defense Ministry data.

Yakut authorities are reluctant to push for recruits among the territory’s Yakut, Yevenk, and Yeven ethnic groups, because indigenous Yakut residents “are unwilling to die for the interests of Moscow,” that Ukrainian intelligence agency report claimed.

“Similar dynamics” of resistance to finding new recruits for the Russian military “are observed in other Far Eastern regions of Russia,” the HUR analysis said.

According to the HUR report, Kremlin authorities have mandated that recruiters failing to meet manpower targets would be transferred to the assault troops, and that in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), seven heads of recruiting points were transferred to frontline service in motorized rifle regiments assigned to Russia’s 5th, 35th and 29th Combined Arms Armies.

In 2023 and 2024, the Kremlin recruited an estimated 150,000 felons and other incarcerated persons for army service, most of whom were assigned to assault units.

Currently, the figure is probably around 50,000 men. Recruitment of more prisoners is increasingly more difficult because of perceptions that assault unit duty is too dangerous, a 2024 British Intelligence analysis said.

According to Ukraine’s military counts – which it says are confirmed by drone video or multiple eyewitnesses on the ground since the Kremlin’s February 2022 invasion – Russian forces have had more than 1.15 million military casualties – soldiers killed or seriously wounded – thanks to an average rate of 1,000-1,200 men a day.

The BBC, together with the Russian independent information group Mediazona, in November reported researchers had identified – by name – 145,258 Russian soldiers killed in action since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On Nov. 7, the Kremlin formally incorporated the Russian-occupied portions of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions into Russia’s Southern Military District. The order permitted, and “legalized” per the occupying regime, the forced impressment of men living in those Ukrainian regions into Russian military service – in combat against Ukraine if necessary.