(Bloomberg) -- Authorities in Moscow offered to pay a huge new bonus to recruits willing to join Russia’s war in Ukraine, the latest sign of mounting pressure to find enough replacements for troops killed and wounded on the battlefield.
A decree issued Tuesday by Mayor Sergei Sobyanin pledged to pay 1.9 million rubles ($22,000) to volunteers who sign military contracts. That’s in addition to 600,000 rubles paid annually in monthly instalments by the city government to supplement wages and bonuses offered by the Russian Defense Ministry.
In total, according to the decree, those joining the war would earn as much as 5.2 million rubles in the first year, provided they survived. The average monthly salary in the capital last year was about 139,000 rubles, according to Federal Statistics Service data.
The offer vaults Moscow to the head of an accelerating pay race among Russian regions striving to find recruits for President Vladimir Putin’s army, amid huge casualties in the war in Ukraine that’s in its third year. With the Kremlin eager to avoid repeating the unpopular mobilization of 300,000 reservists in September 2022, officials are relying on cash incentives to meet a target of enlisting 250,000 soldiers this year.
Western estimates put Russian casualties at as high as 500,000 since the start of the February 2022 invasion. The UK Ministry of Defence said Russia may have lost 70,000 killed or wounded in just the past two months, calling them the largest daily losses since the war began.
That’s as the Russian army continues a slow advance on the front against Ukrainian forces that are gradually taking delivery of tens of billions of dollars in new weapons from their US and European allies.
The military’s search for manpower is intensifying a labor shortage in Russia’s economy that’s forcing businesses to hike salaries to compete. That’s contributing to spiraling inflation in Russia, prompting the central bank to warn it may hike the key interest rate to try to curb price growth when policymakers meet this week.
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