Sign on the dotted line New investigation by Verstka Media finds systematic coercion of Russian draftees to enlist as contract soldiers, possibly in preparation for the end of combat in Ukraine
Russian army officers are systematically coercing draftees who have been fighting since 2022 to sign professional contracts with the Defense Ministry, according to a new investigation from Verstka Media citing dozens of soldiers in different units now deployed in Ukraine, soldiers’ wives, and numerous discussions in Telegram chat groups. Men who refuse to enlist with the military as contract soldiers are threatened with reassignment to assault units, where they’re likely to die in combat. Draftees often have just a few hours to decide.
“Those who don’t sign are either immediately sent to the assault units, or they’re stripped of their position and sent God knows where,” one source told Verstka Media. Russian army officers are reportedly forcing contract service on draftees wherever they can find them, from mobilized soldiers in rear support roles to men in convalescent regiments recovering from surgery after being wounded:
Whether a soldier is offered a contract “in a humane way,” without threats, or pressured with intimidation until they sign depends on the commander, according to servicemen and their relatives. “They offered it to our guys, too, saying there would be more money, but all 15 refused,” the wife of one mobilized soldier told Verstka. “Either way, you’ll end up in the assault units if the commander doesn’t like you, regardless of your official status. And a contract? That’s a pit you’ll never crawl out of.”
Russia’s military has several reasons for forcing mobilized soldiers to sign service contracts. For starters, there’s a shortage of experienced personnel. Most draftees have been on the front for more than two years, while new contract soldiers, according to one serviceman, are “completely green”: “They haven’t even gone through conscript service, or their health is so bad they can’t march three kilometers. Contract soldiers like that don’t strengthen the army.” Officers are also reluctant to take volunteers recruited from prisons and pretrial detention centers — many remain in training units for months because “no one wants to share a trench with those people.”
Second, the drive to sign draftees to contracts is born of fears that Russia’s military will hemorrhage soldiers once combat operations end in Ukraine. Most mobilized soldiers will almost certainly return home after President Putin revokes his mobilization order, but contract soldiers will be required to remain in uniform until their contracts expire. “There shouldn’t be anyone without a contract on the line of contact at all […] The only logical explanation is that they’re planning a freeze along the front and possibly some kind of demobilization. You’ve got to ensure that it sends home the minimum number of people,” a soldier in one of the Defense Ministry’s special units told Verstka.
Third, according to Verstka’s sources, the military hopes to avert “social unrest” by locking disgruntled draftees into contracts that limit their freedom to “write and talk” about their frustrations with the indefinite nature of their deployment. “The tension itself doesn’t go away because contracts without expiration dates are just another form of subjugation. But from a formal standpoint, the authorities can say: ‘Hey, he signed a contract. What could his problems possibly be?’ From where the bureaucrats are sitting, it doesn’t matter if he signed voluntarily or under pressure,” a source told Verstka.
Finally, the military is also eager to show high numbers in its recruitment statistics, and officers on the ground are twisting draftees’ arms to goose their performance figures:
“The monthly stats matter to the commanders, get it? They report up the chain that they signed X-many thousand contracts this month, and it falls on their subordinates. Nobody knows where they got these contract soldiers and whether they recruited them off the street or just shuffled them around within the system,” a former soldier told Verstka.
Another bonus for the Defense Ministry is that mobilized soldiers who sign service contracts forfeit the one-time payment of several hundred thousand rubles that civilian volunteers receive.
The campaign to force mobilized soldiers into contracts coincides with a decline in the number of people willing to enlist in Russia’s military over the past six months. In Moscow, for example, recruitment numbers have fallen drastically. According to Verstka’s sources in the city administration, Moscow typically sent 250 volunteers to the front each day last fall. The city’s daily average is now just 40 men.
Most draftees who spoke to Verstka Media about being pressured to sign army contracts said they ultimately agreed, primarily to avoid the deadly work of assault units. Men who held out said their greater fear is being deployed to other conflicts in the future: “For us, being mobilized at least means we’ll be demobilized. Contract soldiers will just be sent off to keep fighting — in Africa, in Transnistria, they’ll find somewhere.”