Mobilization in Russia for Aug. 16-23, 2026 CIT Volunteer Summary

Authorities and Legislation

The Russian government's legislative commission has endorsed a proposal to count time spent in contract service toward seniority in state and municipal service. Similar measures, though only regarding seniority for municipal service, would be extended to fighters in volunteer units of Rosgvardia [the Russian National Guard] and the Armed Forces. Military service by contract soldiers and volunteer fighters currently counts toward overall work experience and state civil service seniority, but not toward seniority in local government. The proposal would amend the laws on the status of military personnel and on service in internal affairs bodies. If the bill becomes law, war participants will be eligible for higher posts in the government apparatus, seniority bonuses, additional paid leave, and earlier retirement. The initiative is intended to ease their transition into civil service.

The same commission has endorsed a bill allowing military personnel of rescue units of the Ministry of Emergency Situations to use physical force and firearms while performing official duties, including protecting the lives of service members, employees of the Federal Fire Service, and civil servants; preventing the seizure of vehicles and military equipment; and combating drones. The proposal would amend the civil defense law and add provisions to the law on state protection of judges and officials of law enforcement and oversight agencies. The initiative would apply to about 7,900 service members of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who take part in mine-clearing, evacuation, and the delivery of "humanitarian aid" to combat zones. The government sent the bill back for revision, finding the provision on the use of weapons during detention regardless of the gravity of the crime too broad.

Army Recruitment

The Vazhnyye Istorii independent media outlet calculated, based on national budget spending on recruitment for the war, that 60,100 people received payments for signing contracts with the Ministry of Defense in the second quarter of 2026. Thus, taking the first-quarter figures into account, 131,300 people signed contracts during the first six months of the year. During the same period in 2025, 127,500 contract soldiers received the national sign-up payments.

According to an analysis by German economist Janis Kluge, who studies regional budget data, around 79,000 people may have joined the Russian Armed Forces during the first three months of 2026, while around 93,000 new contracts were signed in the second quarter, bringing the total for the first half of the year to approximately 172,000. That is 40,000 more than the figure based on the national budget. Meanwhile, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has claimed that more than 200,000 contract soldiers joined the army during the first six months.

Authorities in the Zabaykalsky region have reduced the payment for mobilized soldiers who sign contracts with the MoD, from 2 million rubles [$24,000] to 400,000 rubles [$4,810]. At the same time, equivalent payments for conscripts and other Russian citizens remain unchanged. Meanwhile, the bonus for foreign nationals and stateless persons signing contracts in the region has been increased from 400,000 rubles [$4,810] to 900,000 rubles [$10,800].

Anton Vasilyev, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Altai region, said that over the past four years, the number of convicts in the region has fallen by half, from 10,000-12,000 to 5,000-6,000. He cited their recruitment for the war against Ukraine as one of the reasons. According to Vasilyev, the same trend has been observed in other regions of the country, leading to the closure of some penal colonies. Meanwhile, the Federal Penitentiary Service has not published statistics on the number of inmates in the country's penal colonies since the end of 2022.

Ghana has asked Russia to stop recruiting its citizens for the war against Ukraine. According to Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, 62 Ghanaian citizens have already been killed in the war, while another 15 are listed as missing. His Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, confirmed that Ghanaians had signed contracts with the Russian MoD and said Russian government agencies would consider the issue of halting their recruitment. Earlier, at least 14 Ghanaian citizens were reportedly offered jobs as security guards in Russia but were instead given military contracts to sign; 11 of them subsequently went missing. One of those killed, Yeboa Augustine, was buried in the Irkutsk region.

The Vyorstka media outlet found that around 2,000 job postings for warehouse security guards at Wildberries and Ozon appeared on the Avito classified-advertising website beginning Aug. 17. The postings may be used as a cover for recruiting people for the war. Applicants are offered one-year "special contracts" with the MoD, with promises of service in rear-area mobile fire teams and no deployment to the frontline. The contract-signing process is reportedly identical to that offered to war recruits. Those who sign are also promised a sign-up bonus of 3.1 million rubles [$37,200].

It has also emerged that 50-year-old Saint Petersburg resident Aleksandr Bugaev, who previously suffered a heart attack, is being prepared for deployment to the frontline instead of the promised service with a "mobile air-defense unit in the Leningrad region." According to his daughter, Bugaev was contacted by BARS [Special Combat Army Reserve] with an offer to work in a mobile unit protecting oil refineries in the Leningrad region. To take the job, he was asked to travel to Tula for a medical evaluation. On Aug. 20, he was assigned fitness category B, after which he was pressured into signing a contract with the MoD, with assurances that he would serve within the Leningrad region. Instead, Bugaev was sent to Voronezh, and he is now reportedly being prepared for deployment to a combat zone for six months.

A refugee from the Kursk region, Ivan Gurov, was forced to sign a contract with the MoD after criticizing the region’s Governor Alexander Khinshtein. At one of the official’s meetings with local residents, Gurov complained that his settlement was being shelled and that residents were not being given housing certificates. Khinshtein interrupted the man and demanded that he stop spreading false information. After the incident, Gurov was repeatedly summoned to the enlistment office, allegedly on the pretext that his personal file had been lost, and was also threatened with prosecution under the law on "discrediting" the RuAF. In the end, the man, who had previously taken part in the war in Syria, signed a contract with the BARS (Special Combat Army Reserve) volunteer unit.

A 37-year-old resident of the Ryazan region, Sergey, was forced to sign a contract with the MoD. According to his relatives, on July 1, the head of the local administration arrived at his home accompanied by court bailiffs and several military personnel. The man had never previously served in the military due to mental health issues. They offered him to sign a contract, and when he refused, the soldiers said he needed to go to the enlistment office and sign a refusal to enter into a contract. On the way, the soldiers bought the man vodka and tried to get him drunk. He later managed to report that he had been taken to a recruitment center in Ryazan, where he was subjected to psychological pressure and he was forced to sign one of the documents. Sergey subsequently refused to enter into a contract with the MoD, and before he was sent to the frontline, he jumped from the third floor of the recruitment center and broke both legs. However, after receiving medical treatment, he was not discharged on medical grounds but was assigned as a rifleman in the assault platoon of the 656th Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 68th Army Corps and was sent back to the frontline on Aug. 14. He has not been in contact with his family since. The man was officially unemployed and did odd jobs in his home village. According to his sister, the head of the local administration told her that the district had received a recruitment quota with the names of 10 men, including her brother. Most of those on the list had debts or loans.

The practice of coercing people into signing military contracts continues in the Penza region. In the village of Podgornoye in the Bashmakovsky district, Sergey Milkin, 59, a disabled man who had undergone heart surgery and had nearly lost his voice, was called in on March 3 to meet with the village administrator, allegedly for a talk about his drinking, after which he disappeared. It later emerged that a local police officer had taken him from the administration building, and the following day he was given a new military ID, forced to sign a contract and dispatched to Rostov without his belongings or medication. On March 27, less than a month after being sent to Rostov, he died—officially from a heart attack. His daughter did not receive a death benefit and filed complaints with the Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s office, but military investigators said there had been no pressure on the man when he signed the contract.

Another Penza region resident, Aleksandr Bychkov, 44, was taken from his apartment in the village of Lesnoy in the Kolyshleysky district by four unidentified men accompanied by the head of the local administration Olga Moiseyeva, claiming he needed to give testimony in a criminal case. Bychkov was taken away along with his documents to an unknown location. The following day he called his wife from Rostov and told her he was being sent to the front. He said he had not been taken to a police station but was put directly into a car waiting on the highway, where he was injected with an unknown substance and then beaten and forced to sign a document. He had never previously served in the military on medical grounds. His wife is now filing complaints with the military prosecutor’s office and police.

In the city of Kumertau in Bashkortostan [Russia's constituent republic], military enlistment officers came to a dormitory and took a man with a Group II disability from the dormitory. He had previously undergone a craniotomy and is HIV-positive. He said in a phone call that he had signed numerous documents and would most likely be sent to the frontline. Since then, there has been no contact with him, and officials at the military enlistment office have not provided his relatives with any specific information. All of his documents, including his military ID, are in his mother’s possession. Nevertheless, he has already been issued a new passport in Magnitogorsk. According to his relatives, earlier in August, during a court hearing concerning child support, the man was also pressured to sign a military contract. He has since paid off his child-support debt.

Human rights advocates are reporting on attempts by Russian men subject to travel restrictions imposed by military enlistment offices to leave Belarus by air. One conscript said that, despite being subject to a travel ban, he traveled by train from Moscow to Belarus. He then passed through border control at Minsk Airport without any problems and flew to Tashkent. According to him, however, another Russian citizen who was ahead of him was turned back. Another young man, who has been subject to a travel ban since January, also traveled to Minsk by train. He completed check-in and security screening, but at passport control he was told that the system would not allow him to pass because of the existing ban on leaving Russia. However, he was not given any written explanation for the refusal.

Mobilized Soldiers, Contract Soldiers and Conscripts

Based on open sources, Mediazona [independent Russian media outlet] and BBC News Russian, together with volunteers, have verified the names of 241,088 Russian fighters killed in Ukraine, including 19,853 mobilized soldiers. Over the past week, the list has grown by 1,734 soldiers. The average age of those killed has increased to 38, which is roughly 10 years higher than the average of those killed in the spring and summer of 2022. Journalists have also identified 6,435 men under the age of 24 who were killed in the war.

According to the tally of the Vot Tak [Like This] media outlet, at least 50 Russian servicewomen have been killed on the frontline since the outset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While five women died in 2022, the number rose to 15 in 2025, with 12 deaths already recorded in the first half of 2026. The majority of female casualties were between the ages of 31 and 49, with the oldest being 57 and the youngest 23.

On Aug. 19, Ukraine and Russia conducted a 103-for-103 POW [prisoner of war] exchange. Among the 103 Russians who returned, 50 had prior convictions or signed contracts while under investigation, and nine were mobilized soldiers. 67 had spent less than a year in captivity, ten of them less than three months, while only two had been held for over two years. The complete list of exchanged Russian servicemen has been published by the Nash Vykhod [Our Way Out] Telegram channel. Those returned to Ukraine included service members from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Navy, territorial defense, the National Guard and the border service, including several officers; most had injuries or severe illnesses. The youngest captive released was 25, the oldest 59, and one of the captives had been held since 2017.

At least 13 conscripts signed contracts with the MoD after being tortured at a military unit in Kursk. On May 15, 38 conscripts were sent from a unit in the Moscow region to Kursk. On arrival, they were placed in barracks with a collapsed ceiling and no toilets, and were then pressured to sign contracts. On May 18, the pressure escalated into torture: for six hours they were made to run in gas masks in the heat while smoke grenades were thrown at them and blank rounds were fired at them. Relatives said that all the conscripts were given a choice: sign a contract with the MoD, or sign a paper transferring them to a unit on the border with Ukraine. In the end, 13 young men agreed to sign contracts, and all of them are now in the Luhansk region. Commanders refused to accept their written requests to withdraw consent to contracts signed under duress.

Conscripts serving in the 27th Motorized Rifle Division are also being forced to sign contracts in Totskoye-2, in the Orenburg region. On Aug. 18, conscript Maksim Struchkov and several other draftees signed contracts there. The next day, Maksim tried to submit a written request to annul the order bringing the contract into force, but he was forcibly held at headquarters and was not even allowed to go to the commandant's office. Military police officers later managed to take the soldier out of the unit, after which he filed an application to terminate the contract.

A conscript from Saint Petersburg who was serving in the 6th Engineer-Sapper Regiment was forced to sign a contract 81 days before the end of his service, his sister says. She said the young man signed the contract under pressure at a unit in Rostov Veliky, in the Yaroslavl region, and that all the conscripts serving alongside him signed contracts the same way. The young men were threatened with prison and being sent to war.

A student from Tambov, Artyom Semenov, who had signed a contract to serve as a UAV operator, was reassigned to assault duties without his consent. According to his wife, Semenov, a student at an instrumentation engineering college, took a leave of absence, completed training as a UAV operator and was assigned to the 45th Special Forces Brigade. But in August, he was transferred to the 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiment and designated for assault duties. Semenov’s wife said that the Military Prosecutor’s Office had verbally acknowledged that the transfer was illegal, but had not helped return him to his previous assignment.

A candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) [right-wing populist and ultranationalist political party] in elections to the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg was transferred to an assault unit after filing a request for leave to participate in the campaign, the party said. The candidate, Yevgeny Zhigalov, 31, signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense in the fall of 2024. Before the campaign began, he requested the leave to which he was entitled under the law. His request, however, was never acted upon, and he was instead transferred to an assault unit in a different military unit. Soon afterward, Zhigalov stopped responding to calls and messages.

Assistance

Non-repayable payments from businesses to the Russian federal budget reached a record 383.69 billion rubles [$5 billion] between early 2026 and mid-August. The sharp surge began in March after Vladimir Putin suggested during a closed-door meeting with major business owners that they make "voluntary" contributions to the budget. In just seven and a half months, these payments have surpassed the total for all of 2025 by 50% (251.3 billion rubles / $3 billion), even though the Ministry of Finance had initially projected a mere 1.7 billion rubles [$20.4 million] in such revenues for the entire year.

In Irkutsk, small and medium-sized businesses will be compensated from the municipal budget for expenses incurred while supporting Russian soldiers. Entrepreneurs who repaired and provided vehicles for the war will be eligible to claim reimbursements covering up to 50% of their facility rental, tools and spare parts costs—capped at 1 million rubles [$12,000] per recipient. The initiative comes as Irkutsk's municipal debt has more than tripled over the past year, reaching nearly 4.5 billion rubles [$54 million]. Meanwhile, the Irkutsk region's debt grew by 26% in the first half of the year, climbing to 103.4 billion rubles [$1 billion].

Longreads

The Vot Tak [Like This] media outlet has reported on how Russian women participate in the invasion of Ukraine, what positions they are offered, why they agree to serve, and what they face at the frontline.

The Novaya Gazeta [independent Russian newspaper] has reported on the private war recruitment market using the example of the Avrora agency.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has published an article on the abduction of wounded soldiers from hospitals and right off the streets, carried out by so-called "search groups."

Vazhnyye Istorii has reported on how residents of the Penza region tried to resist mass roundups in the region.

Mediazona has spoken with Obninsk resident Vladimir Terekhov, who went to war following his son, was featured in a report by Margarita Simonyan [Russian propagandist, editor-in-chief of the RT international news television network] about volunteer fighters, and fled Russia three years later.