After almost five years of war, the Kremlin has arrived at a decision it can no longer postpone. Western estimates put Russian losses at over 30,000 soldiers killed and wounded every month. Around a thousand new recruits are signed up every day - and those thousand are not enough to advance, only to plug the holes in units that have already been emptied.

The choice facing Moscow comes down to two options, and both are unpleasant. Either even more aggressive contract recruitment, or a new mass mobilisation - the solution Putin last used in September 2022, when he called up 300,000 reservists and got protests and a rush for the border at the same time.

The contract as a substitute for the call-up

Since then Moscow has carefully avoided the word mobilisation. Instead it has been building a recruitment machine that has so far delivered around 1.3 million soldiers. The tool is money: signing bonuses and payments that, for a man from a poor province, are worth more than he would earn in several years at home. Where wages are low, a contract is not a choice - it is the only arithmetic that works.

But the methods have got rougher. Police detain men in the street, pull them out of workplaces or summon them to the station, then take them from there to recruitment centres where the pressure is to sign. One activist described it in a single sentence: it has all turned into a manhunt - with deception, coercion, threats and violence.

Quotas from Moscow, paid by the head

Regional governors receive quotas from the centre. The provinces pay both the recruiters and anyone who brings in a man - several thousand dollars for each signature. This is no longer an army that calls people up, it is a market that buys them. And like any market, when supply tightens the price rises, and the methods for sourcing the "goods" get harsher.

Surveys show Russians' confidence in the course of the war has fallen to its lowest level since April 2022. Analysts expect Moscow to raise the bonuses and the pressure on the regions first, keeping mobilisation as a last resort - because the political price of 2022 is still remembered in the Kremlin.

And that is exactly what makes the story darker than the numbers. The state has calculated that buying men one at a time is cheaper than asking the nation out loud. As long as the bill is paid in provinces Moscow rarely mentions, the war remains something that happens to other people.