Russia has increased efforts to recruit women to fight in defense units near the country's border with Ukraine, according to a Thursday report.
Russia has historically not used female service members for combat, and last fall a member of Russia's parliament said the country would only turn to female recruits as a "last resort."
However, with Russia continuing to suffer high casualty rates in Ukraine and struggling to fill its ranks with new male recruits, authorities in at least one region are hoping women fighters can fill in its gaps in defense.
According to The Moscow Times, officials in Russia's southwestern Belgorod region have focused recent recruitment efforts on bolstering defense units with female fighters. Belgorod has been the site of escalated attacks in recent months, which regional leaders have blamed on Ukraine. (Kyiv has denied involvement in attacks in Belgorod, while two groups who have said they are responsible for some of the incidents identify as Russian dissidents.)
On Thursday, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported that Russia had lost 240,010 troops thus far over the course of the war that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched in February 2022.
Russia has also reportedly faced problems meetings its recruitment goals. In late March, the British Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence update that the Kremlin was preparing a "major military recruitment campaign" with the hope of signing up an additional 400,000 troops. However, the ministry said Russia would not reach that goal.
"It is highly unlikely that the campaign will attract 400,000 genuine volunteers," the department wrote, adding that "regional authorities will try to meet their allocated recruitment targets by coercing men to join up."
Signs point to Russia looking for other ways to fill its ranks. This week, the nation's parliament extended the maximum age at which men can be mobilized to serve in the military. The law, passed on Tuesday, allows men to serve up to the age of 70.
The Kremlin said last fall it had no intention of conscripting women, and Tatyana Butskaya—a State Duma deputy and the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children—told URA.ru at the time that she doesn't believe women should be called up for service.
"This is absolutely not about our history...There is always a male warrior and a woman who is waiting for him, guarding the hearth. Women have always taken a different defense," she said. "On the whole, war—it's not for women. And women would be drafted only as a last resort."
As further evidence of the small role women play in Putin's forces, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced in March that 1,100 Russian women were serving in Ukraine and that his country's armed forces had 39,000 women in total in its ranks. That figure represents a fraction of the 1.15 million active military personnel in Russia's military force.
Pavel Luzin, a non-resident senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told Newsweek that Russia's military has been experiencing a decline over the years in female members after having around 5,000 in 2012.
Of the 1,100 currently in the armed forces, Luzin said "their main roles are military personnel in staffs, NCOs (non-commissioned officers) at the communication units [and] not at the frontline."
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense via email for comment.
Russian state television stations have recently been trying to lure female recruits by airing programs that highlight the work of an all-female unit receiving military training in Belgorod, The Moscow Times reported. Some of the footage is said to show school teachers and librarians shooting rifles.
The Moscow Times shared a Telegram post that included a recruitment ad for women that was originally posted by Natalia Kolesnikova, a member of Belgorod's territorial defense.
The independent Russian news outlet Verstka spoke with Kolesnikova, who said new female recruits in Belgorod will take a course in basic military training, as well as learn how to fly drones.
She also noted that while there were no age or physical fitness requirements for female recruits, prospective enlistees "need to understand that you will have to run, jump, etc., everyone decides for herself whether she can or not."
Luzin pointed out Russia could potentially increase its number of female fighters by using the 270,000 to 300,000 women who currently work in civil public service for Russia's defense ministry.
"If their positions will be converted one day into military positions they will become military servicewomen and the number of women in the Russian Armed Forces (RAF) will increase," Luzin said of these workers. "For instance, recently the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) converted all the officers of internal service—officers who worked in police departments as HR managers, accountants, etc.—into the common police officers. That gave a formal increase of police officers, and on paper it looks like the MIA filled the significant lack of policemen and policewomen. The same may appear in the MoD (Ministry of Defense) because of its ambitions in increasing the number of the RAF."
However, Luzin added, "military service actually is not popular among the Russian women."
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jon Jackson is an Associate Editor at Newsweek based in New York. His focus is on reporting on the Ukraine ... Read more
