On a single day in April this year, Moscow's mayoral office recorded just 1,708 people sent to the front — roughly 1,000 fewer than during the same month in 2024. That shrinking number, quietly compiled by city administrators and later obtained by the independent Russian exile outlet Verstka, may be the clearest signal yet that the Kremlin's volunteer recruitment machine is running dry. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin is secretly preparing a new round of military mobilisation for the autumn. Speaking in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said his intelligence services had detected deliberate preparations being obscured behind vague language and indirect signals.

"It is important that we, together with our partners, exert sufficient pressure on Russia so that the idea of peace, rather than further Russian mobilisation, prevails," he said. He also argued that Russian forces are currently losing soldiers at the front faster than they can be replaced, even as Putin pushes to intensify offensive operations. Investigative reporting published in late June by Verstka and the Latvia-based Russian-language portal Vazhnyye Istorii deepens that picture. According to those outlets, Russia's leadership has been holding private discussions about a formal mobilisation, driven by a recruitment crisis that worsened markedly in the final quarter of 2025.

Fixed-term contract sign-ups more than halved compared with the same period the previous year, and sources across multiple Russian regions reported sharply declining interest in army contracts. Military personnel interviewed by Verstka described many newly arrived contract soldiers as unfit for combat, with some deserting the front lines almost immediately. One conscript told the outlet that units were staffed at only 30 to 40 percent of their required strength. Putin issued a partial mobilisation decree in September 2022 — one that his own presidential administration confirmed remains legally in force.