Moscow has not disclosed any casualties in the conflict since the first weeks, but Western officials and the government in Kiev say they number in the thousands. The increase includes a 137,000 increase in the number of combat personnel to 1.15 million. It takes effect on January 1, according to the decree published on the government’s legislative portal. The last time Putin set the size of the Russian military was in November 2017, when the number of combat personnel was set at 1.01 million out of a total number of armed forces, including non-combatants, of 1.9 million. Russia has not said how many casualties it has suffered in Ukraine since the first weeks of the campaign, when it said 1,351 of its soldiers had been killed. Western estimates say the true number could be at least 10 times higher, while Ukraine says it has killed or wounded at least 45,000 Russian soldiers since the conflict – which Moscow calls a special military operation – began on February 24. Kyiv has also been reluctant to release information on how many of its soldiers have died in the war, but on Monday Ukraine’s armed forces chief said nearly 9,000 servicemen had been killed in a rare update. Putin’s decree did not say how the increase in the number of workers was to be achieved, but instructed the government to allocate the corresponding budget. According to an authoritative annual report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Russia had 900,000 active employees at the start of this year and reserves of 2 million people with service over the past five years. (Reporting by Reuters Editing by John Stonestreet and Angus MacSwan)
