Responding to an order by Vladimir Putin last week to boost the size of the Russian military, the Foreign Ministry said “Russia has lost tens of thousands of troops” in Ukraine, and even if it increases the number of conscripts, they are not required to serve outside of Russia. territory, while Moscow insists that its presence in Ukraine is a special military operation and not an outright war. “The order is unlikely to make substantial progress toward increasing Russia’s combat power in Ukraine,” the State Department said. Putin did not say why he had ordered a roughly 13 percent increase in the size of Russia’s military to more than 1.15 million, but estimates say Russia has suffered about 75,000 dead or wounded in six months of war. Russia has been trying to recruit volunteers for its army for the past three months, but Western analysts said the quality of those recruits varies widely. The US-based Institute for the Study of War said it now expects the Kremlin to soon deploy one of those new battalions, the 3rd Army Corps, to the Donbass and southern Kherson region, but that it may struggle in combat. “Better equipment does not necessarily make for more effective forces when personnel are not well trained or disciplined, as many members of the volunteer units of the 3rd Army Corps are not,” he said.
