Putin’s army expansion may not help Russia much, U.S. and British officials say

An order announced last Thursday raises Russia’s target number of active-duty service members by about 137,000, to 1.15 million, beginning in January. But that number is unlikely to be reached quickly, and Russia will be unable to train or deploy new troops effectively enough to make up for huge casualties in Ukraine, analysts said.

Mr. Putin’s announcement “is unlikely to make substantive progress towards increasing Russia’s combat power in Ukraine,” Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Sunday…

Even if Russia could somehow attract army recruits, it would struggle to train them quickly because some of its training units were deployed to Ukraine and suffered casualties, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington research body.

It could seek to bring in more conscripts from the roughly 130,000 mostly young men who would be called up for one year of mandatory military service in the fall, the group said, or it could absorb Russian proxy forces of the breakaway republics of eastern Ukraine into its regular army.