There's a sort of military planning that speaks louder than a press release and Russia has just been caught in the act. Last month Western intelligence officials told The Wall Street Journal that officers had gone to St. Petersburg to do drills of how quickly Russia's armed forces could house, feed and arm an unexpected surge of conscripts if a war were to break out. The officials claim that similar readiness exercises are presently being secretly practiced throughout the country. No order has been issued. The Kremlin maintains there has been no decision made. But armies don't train up hundreds of thousands of new bodies unless some big wielding one thinks it might need to.

The drills were focused on Kaliningrad – it is a message which should be sat with. The exclave is sandwiched between two NATO countries Poland and Lithuania and the Russian continent with the thin Suwalki corridor being the most dangerous area between them, noted by NATO planners for years as the most dangerous seam in Europe. The test of mobilisation logistics is not incidental; it is a sign of Moscow's mind considering manpower for Ukraine and, not to say a scenario, but thinking about a scenario that will involve NATO's eastern flank. In any event, western officials believe that any real order will likely be delayed until after Russia's State Duma elections in late September, when such a decision will be made without the political price tag being paid at the ballot box.

The timing is important since the first mobilization in September 2022 was a political disaster the Kremlin has been working hard to avoid for three years. Within a few days, hundreds of thousands of men were running away from the country. Recruitment offices were bombed with firebombs. State pollsters didn't have to try very hard to hide the fact that public support for the war fell. Since then, Putin has used primarily financial incentives rather than conscripts to maintain a presence in the trenches, and this approach is clearly having an impact. The amount of signing bonuses has risen to a record level in the region, with offers of more than eight thousand dollars averaging the salaries of Russians. Combat pay is 200,000-240,000 rubles per month, and payments to relatives for death can be as high as 12-15 million rubles. The money spent on recruiter commissions alone more than doubled this year, from 358 million rubles per month to 802 million.

But the dollar is not getting the bang for its buck. According to an analysis by the German economist Janis Kluge, the rate of new enlistees in the federal budget in the first quarter of 2026 is around 800 contracts per day, the lowest in three years and almost 20 percent less than in the same period last year. Since then, recruitment has gradually been returning to 1,000 contracts per day, extending the recruitment net to older candidates, males that have suffered from various health problems or have criminal records, as well as foreign workers imported from India, North Korea and various other parts of Africa. Advertisements are becoming more prevalent as a way to camouflage infantry positions as rear area/humanitarian jobs. Independent Russian media reports have traced another, less consensual path an increasing number of military-age men being rounded up by the police in various parts of the country, including Penza, Udmurtia, Ulyanovsk and Rostov, where regional authorities have begun to forcibly return conscripts to enlistment offices. The demand for military registration-and mobilisation preparedness specialists has increased massively on the largest recruitment site in Russia, with about 2,500 positions listed, including thirteen hundred over the past week. That doesn't sound like a system that's sure this can fulfill its objectives with persuasion.

The battle maths sums up why the tension is mounting despite the political danger. On current pace, Russian military operations in the entirety of July progressed only 38 square kilometers, according to Ruslan Pukhov of Moscow's Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, making Putin's declared intention of “full control” of Donetsk and Luhansk look “generationally distant,” not “near,” as the Kremlin puts it. Both sides of the conflict see a shortage of manpower, far greater than can be filled by bonuses, and losses have outstripped new recruits in recent months. Meanwhile, defense spending has risen to between seven and eight percent of gross domestic product, a legacy of the Cold War that is sucking wages and workers away from agriculture, construction and manufacturing and into a war economy that is not easily replaced. Economists who have been monitoring the labor market call this the harder of two wars that Russia had to fight: The battle for money can be printed or borrowed, but the battle for the shrinking and aging workforce can't be done by decree.

The actual message of the Kaliningrad exercise is that. If a country has a strong recruitment pipeline, the worry about a country having to test its ability to take mass calls is not warranted, just keep on issuing bonus checks. When a state suspects it's coming to the end of the voluntary system, it practices what it calls involuntary surge. Kyiv and Western backers have a double-edged sword. It is proof that attrition has proven to be an effective strategy but at any cost to humans, and that Moscow's capacity to out produce Ukrainian resistance by sheer force of numbers is no longer a given like it was in 2022 and 2023. However, the second mobilization wave also increases the risks of another surge of infantry numbers arriving before the winter, which might allow them to mount a temporary counteroffensive around the important cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, even if their potential is not high enough to make the effort sustainable. The Suwalki exercise will be interpreted by European capitals as a signal that the worst-case scenario planning for NATO has not been put on hold but put on the backburnner. Markets and sanctions experts, in turn, now have a better manpower-cost benchmark to assess the duration of Moscow's war economy before it begins to have to draft soldiers rather than continue to purchase them.