Putin signs a decree to increase the size of the Russian armed forces

FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in a televised meeting with officials to discuss forest fires at a residence outside Moscow on August 24, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Klementev/Kremlin via Reuters

(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed a decree increasing the size of Russia’s armed forces from 1.9 million to 2.04 million as the war in Ukraine entered its seventh month.

Moscow has not revealed any casualties in the conflict since its early weeks, but Western officials and the Kyiv government say they number in the thousands.

The increase includes an increase in combat personnel by 137,000 to 1.15 million. It comes into force on January 1, according to the decree published on the government’s legislative portal.

The last time Putin specified the size of the Russian army was in November 2017, when the number of combat personnel was set at 1.01 million out of the total number of armed forces, including non-combatants, of 1.9 million.

Russia has not mentioned the number of dead and wounded it has incurred in Ukraine since the first weeks of the campaign, when it said 1,351 of its soldiers had been killed.

Western estimates say the actual number could be at least ten times that, 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 the head of Ukraine’s armed forces said nearly 9,000 soldiers had been killed in a rare update. Read more

Putin’s decree did not say how the increase in staffing would be achieved but instructed the government to allocate the corresponding budget.

According to an official annual report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Russia had 900 thousand active service members at the beginning of this year, and a reserve of 2 million people in service over the past five years.

Reporting by Reuters. Editing by John Stonestreet and Angus McSwan

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