According to Reuters, citing data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the expansion, which comes into force in December, would give Russia the second-largest army in the world – only China would be richer, and the United States and India would have one more.

This is not the first time Putin has tried to expand the army since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian president ordered a 137,000-strong increase in troops in August 2022, followed by a 170,000-strong increase in December 2023.

Nick Reynolds, a land warfare researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, said the increase was consistent with Russia’s ongoing war planning.

In February, Reynolds co-authored a commentary that said 2025 will be a crucial year for Russia. Russia believes it can sustain current losses of troops and equipment until 2025 and is convinced that “victory should be achieved by 2026,” they wrote.

This is certainly possible if Ukraine’s Western allies stop supporting Ukraine, they added. But after 2026, Russia will run out of existing tanks and armored vehicles and will have to rely on the production of new tanks.

The amount of equipment coming off the assembly line “will still be significant,” Reynolds said in an interview with BI on Wednesday. “Just significantly less than now.”

This raises the question of how Russia can supply resources to its already overstretched, even larger army.

“Where will the funding come from? How will the recruitment be handled?” asked Reynolds, adding: “There are still some serious questions about how they will be resourced.”

In addition, it is difficult to imagine that the expansion can be supported with the current training offer, he said.

The troop reinforcements come at a dangerous time for Russia as the country must balance its military objectives in Ukraine with the economic consequences of the war.

Russia has “adapted much better to some of the pressures it has faced than predicted,” Reynolds told BI. But despite all that, he said, “inflation has gone through the roof. The cost of living has gone through the roof.”

Other experts BI spoke to said that while Putin may still be able to expand the Russian army, doing so may only place further strain on Russia’s already overstretched workforce.

Artem Kochev, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, told BI that the Russian labor market would be less affected if the recruitment of soldiers were more targeted.

“Currently, the new recruits can be divided into two groups: indebted people with low socioeconomic status and prison inmates,” says Kochev. “They either work in the less productive branches of the economy or are not part of the labor market at all.”

Russia has recruited so many prisoners that it has begun closing some prisons. A local official told parliamentarians in March that some prisons had to be closed due to a “one-time sharp reduction in the number of prisoners,” the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.

“As long as recruitment is limited to these two groups, the impact on the labor market will be limited,” Kochev said, but noted that even then, recruiting new recruits would still represent a significant financial burden.

In July, Russian media reported that new recruits in Moscow would receive a bonus of 1.9 million rubles, or about $22,000, if they signed a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry.

This package corresponds to the bonuses that the US military offers its recruits, which range from $20,000 to $50,000.

And even if money were not a problem, Russia would still have a hard time meeting its recruitment goals without weakening its own economy.

“Taking another 180,000 people out of the labor market would have serious consequences for the economy,” says Benjamin Hilgenstock, a leading economist at the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.

He added: “The situation on the labour market is already extremely tight. The unemployment rate fell to 2.4 percent in June, which means practically full employment, and nominal wage growth is currently over 15 percent year-on-year.”

The hunger for more troops has prompted Russia to turn to an unexpected source: African migrants and students.

In June, Bloomberg reported that Russian officials had threatened not to renew the visas of African migrant workers and students unless they joined the Russian armed forces.

Jeremy Morris, professor of global studies at Aarhus University, told BI that Russia’s economic problems could overshadow its military challenges if left unaddressed.

“Authoritarian societies like Russia appear calm and controlled, but destabilization can occur quite suddenly,” he said.