By the end of July 2026, the joint project of Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service had confirmed by name the deaths of 236,066 Russian servicemen. This figure is, of course, only a minimum estimate: not every death becomes public knowledge, and the true losses are almost certainly substantially higher.
Wars of this scale in the twentieth century typically relied on mobilization mechanisms—conscription, call-up notices, criminal liability for evasion—even when they fell short of total mobilization. The United States manned its forces in Vietnam through selective conscription; France in Algeria relied on calling up reservists. Russia is waging a full-scale war against Ukraine in a fundamentally different way: without a decree ordering a new draft and without criminal liability for those who have not signed a contract.
Recruitment proceeds instead through individual contractual deals. The “partial mobilization” of September 2022, which brought roughly 300,000 reservists into the ranks, triggered an exodus of between 700,000 and one million people, protests in Dagestan and other regions, and a drop in Putin’s approval rating from 83 per cent to 77 per cent. Having weighed the high political and social costs, the authorities have so far preferred to avoid repeating the experiment.
In its place a system has taken shape that can be called the life-exchange institution: recruitment through cash compensation and criminal amnesty. This practice fits neither the classical model of mercenaryism nor mobilization as it is conventionally understood. The distinction runs along two lines—what exactly the state is buying from the fighter, and how it disposes of what it has acquired—and on both counts the Russian model falls outside the familiar categories.
Why this is not mercenaryism
International law defines mercenaryism narrowly. Article 47 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and the 1989 UN Convention set out six clear criteria: the individual must be specially recruited to take part in the conflict; must take a direct part in hostilities; must be motivated essentially by the desire for private gain substantially higher than that paid to regular combatants; must not be a member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict; must not be a national of a party to the conflict or a resident of territory controlled by it; and must not have been sent by a third state on official duty as a member of its armed forces.
Russian contract soldiers fail the nationality test at the outset. Formally, foreign nationals serving in the Russian Armed Forces could meet the definition, yet they account for only a fraction of a per cent of those fighting. In any case, formal compliance matters little: this small contingent operates according to the same logic of life exchange as Russian contract soldiers, not the classical hiring of military skill.
The substantive difference is more important than the formal one. Classical mercenaryism purchases a fighter’s capacity to produce violence—military expertise detached from his biological existence. A feudal lord hiring a condottiere or Swiss infantry did not hand weapons to peasants; he bought already-trained fighters with combat experience and their own equipment. The modern French Foreign Legion follows the same logic: it acquires ready skill or rigorously selects and trains recruits for the duration of a contract. A five-year term, serious preparation, relatively low losses, and, at the end of service, social guarantees in France, including the possibility of citizenship. The employer is buying not merely a potential fighter but the product of prior disciplinary work—previous military service, a private military school, or the combatant’s own biography. That is the commodity: the capacity to produce violence, separated from the fighter’s biological existence, which remains his own and is returned to him when the contract ends.
In the Russian system what is purchased is not the product of specialized military discipline but the body itself—its biological existence, placed entirely at the state’s disposal until death or loss of fitness. Many contract soldiers have prior experience of conscript service or prison, yet this is not the kind of discipline the Foreign Legion acquires. Conscript service a decade or fifteen years earlier does not confer current combat skill, and prison experience shapes the body according to an entirely different logic. The quality of preparation for combat becomes secondary because the individual soldier himself becomes secondary.
Modern warfare after the mass proliferation of drones has acquired a predominantly positional character: drones have nullified tank superiority, turned any movement of armor into an extremely risky enterprise, and forced troops to advance in small infantry groups under constant aerial observation. Because Russia is on the offensive rather than the defensive, it needs not static positional defense with limited forces but living mass capable of moving forward in waves. This is precisely the logic of the “meat assaults” refined by the Wagner PMC at Bakhmut: successive waves of small groups reveal enemy firing points and exhaust its ammunition at the cost of their own lives.
Exiting a deal with the Russian state is virtually impossible. Since the autumn of 2022, contracts with the Ministry of Defence have in practice become indefinite. Formally the law provides three grounds for discharge: severe injury resulting in a finding of unfitness for service, reaching the age of 65, and conviction for a criminal offence. In practice these options almost never work. The severely wounded encounter administrative obstruction: documents disappear, medical boards are postponed, commanders keep patients on unit strength. Criminal prosecution, meanwhile, has become a tool of retention. Refusal to obey an order brings a sentence that is typically served in penal assault units—that is, still at the front. The impossibility of exit is a direct consequence of the nature of the transaction itself, whose object is not the fighter’s labor but his body.
This is directly linked to the different form of power exercised over the fighter. A classical army is an institution of prolonged training: drill, parade-ground practice, tactical exercises, a hierarchy of ranks, barracks discipline. Its product is a trained body that in battle acts almost automatically and is subordinated indirectly—through internalized norms. In the assault units of the Russian Armed Forces staffed through the life-exchange system, no such structure can be built: bodies are expended too quickly and there is simply no time for training. A man who has signed a contract undergoes preparation lasting from two weeks to a month and a half and is immediately assigned to an assault unit, where control is most often exercised not through habitual discipline but through direct violence directed not only against a particular refuser but against everyone else—through public executions, torture and reprisals inside the unit itself.
This does not mean that regular units of the Russian Armed Forces—tank crews, artillerymen, pilots, air-defense crews—have ceased to function according to disciplinary logic. The point concerns a specific segment staffed through the life-exchange system, and it is this segment that bears the main burden of offensive operations.
Why this is not classical mobilization
The boundary with mobilization runs along a different line—not the object of the transaction, but the form of acquisition. Mobilization in the strict sense is a collective political act: a decree of the supreme authority, call-up notices through military commissariats, criminal liability for evasion, restrictions on departure. Here the state addresses the individual as a citizen obliged to defend the political community. The life-exchange institution is organized quite differently. It consists of a multitude of separate deals in which the state buys the body of a specific person for a defined sum. In essence it is a market transaction transferred into the military sphere. Classical mobilization operates according to a different logic: its foundation is not purchase and sale but the citizen’s duty to the state.
Legally, the September 2022 partial-mobilization decree remains in force and prevents those already serving from resigning. Yet no new call-up notices are being sent to civilians, no new wave of conscription has been announced, and there is no criminal liability for evasion of service for those who have not signed a contract (Article 328 of the Criminal Code applies only to conscript service). The mobilization apparatus is operating in retention mode for those already inside the system, not as a mechanism for bringing in new people. In practice, staffing proceeds through a market mechanism.
This system emerged spontaneously—as a chain of reactive decisions, each of which closed a specific problem left by the previous stage. The full-scale invasion was planned as a short operation lasting 72−96 hours, a small victorious war intended to shore up legitimacy through foreign-policy success. When the blitzkrieg failed and it became clear that more men were needed, the authorities first tried ideological agitation. It proved ineffective as a mobilizing impulse. Twenty years of depoliticization (imitative multiparty politics, ritual elections, the exchange of economic paternalism for political passivity) had prepared the population for passive consent rather than active participation. People did not go to fight for the idea of the “Russian world.”
In September 2022 the second classical option was applied—forcible call-up of reservists. The result was emigration, protests and falling ratings. For a hybrid autocracy that rests not on mass terror but on passive consensus, creating such political problems for itself was irrational. The conclusions were drawn quickly.
At that moment the working model proved to be the one used by the Wagner PMC, which from the summer of 2022 began recruiting in penal colonies on the scheme of “six months’ service in exchange for amnesty.” Previously Wagner had operated according to classical mercenary logic in Syria and the Central African Republic, acquiring already-trained fighters. With the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine the situation changed: large numbers of fighters were required, and they began to be recruited in prisons. After Prigozhin’s mutiny and death the Ministry of Defence absorbed the model he had used into state structures, scaled it up and formalized the amnesty through judicial procedures.
At the same time payments rose. The one-off bonus for signing a contract grew from 195,000 rubles in the autumn of 2022 to multi-million sums by 2026 (the amount varies by region). Regions compete with one another for contract soldiers and regularly revise the size of payments. On top of this comes monthly pay of at least 210,000 rubles, as well as multi-million compensations for the families of the dead.
The life-exchange institution
The formal voluntariness of the deal is of critical importance for how it is perceived in society. A dead serviceman who signed a contract for money is seen not as a victim of state policy but as a man who made his own choice. According to sociologists at the Levada Centre, attitudes towards contract soldiers and Wagner fighters are “entirely different from those towards conscripts and mobilized men”: people “are not expected to worry about their fate,” and their deaths are treated as “the private grief of their relatives.” The shift to staffing through volunteer contracts after the failure of partial mobilization “allowed the majority of Russians to breathe a sigh of relief.” The death of a “volunteer” does not provoke the indignation that the death of forcibly mobilized men on a comparable scale would have caused. This works precisely because the acquisition was framed as a market transaction rather than a political expropriation.
An ideological component is present in the system, yet it functions differently from classical mobilization. Propaganda does not initiate the move to the front; it supplies those who have already signed a contract with ready-made formulas for rationalizing the deal they have struck. Clichés about “defense against NATO,” a “historic mission” and the “Russian world” are selected after the fact, turning an economic transaction into something resembling meaningful action.
How sustainable is this model?
The construction is unstable. The growth in payments points to an inflationary dynamic: to keep the flow going, the offer has to be continually increased. Military spending in the first quarter of 2026 reached a record 5.9 trillion rubles—46 per cent of all budgetary expenditure. Classical forcible mobilization is several times cheaper in fiscal terms, but its high political cost forces the authorities to bear the economic burden instead.
At the same time any serious change in the configuration—exhaustion of the subsidy pool, an economic downturn, or a decline in regions’ willingness to compete on payments—would put the system in question. The life-exchange institution functions only under specific conditions: an active war without general mobilization, the political impossibility of open conscription, and the existence of financial reserves that allow human resources to be purchased on the market rather than extracted from society through political obligation.
Should a new wave of mobilization occur, life exchange would most likely cease to be the dominant mechanism for replenishing the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces. Mobilization would close the current manpower gap against a shrinking pool of volunteers and rising losses. The compensation mechanism would remain as a means of dampening discontent among families. The contract option would probably also survive, but only as a supplementary channel that partially relieves pressure on the political legitimacy of compulsory call-up. Under conditions of mobilization the one-off bonuses for signing a contract would in all likelihood be reduced: they place too heavy a burden on the regional budgets from which they are paid.
