Vladimir V. Putin exuded confidence. Sitting back, surrounded by foreign dignitaries, the Russian president explained the futility of Ukrainian resistance. Russia had the advantage on the battlefield, as he saw it, and by rejecting his demands, Ukraine risked even more for peace.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeep at it, then, keep at it. It will only get worse,\u201d Mr. Putin said at an economic forum in June, as he taunted the Ukrainian government. \u201cWherever a Russian soldier sets his foot, it\u2019s ours,\u201d he added, a smirk animating his face.<\/p>\n
His self-assurance is born out of the Russian military\u2019s resurgence.<\/p>\n
In the depths of 2022, his underequipped forces were disoriented, decimated and struggling to counter Ukraine\u2019s hit-and-run tactics and precision-guided weapons. Instead of abandoning the invasion, Mr. Putin threw the full strength of the Russian state behind the war, re-engineering the military and the economy with a singular goal of crushing Ukraine. In his push, the country revamped recruitment, weapons production and frontline tactics.
This is now a war of attrition favoring Russia, which has mobilized more men and arms than Ukraine and its Western backers. While their casualties are mounting, Russian forces are edging forward across most of the 750-mile front, strengthening Mr. Putin\u2019s resolve to keep fighting until he gets the peace deal he wants.<\/p>\n
Source: Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Critical Threats Project (extent of Russia-controlled areas)<\/p>\n
Ukraine and its allies hope to hold out long enough to exhaust Mr. Putin\u2019s forces. In World War I, the German Army had made it within about 40 miles of Paris before it collapsed. The German Empire capitulated and disintegrated months later.<\/p>\n
There are warning signs for Russia. Its elite infantry units have been wiped out. Its military plants depend on foreign components and dwindling Soviet-era stocks. Its economy<\/a> shows cracks.<\/p>\n Mr. Putin figures that he can manage the wartime pressures longer than Ukraine and can secure a peace deal that would ensure his legacy. He has repeatedly demanded four regions that Moscow has claimed to have annexed and sought a deal that blocks Ukraine from joining NATO and limits the size of its military.<\/p>\n If talks with President Trump in Alaska this week don\u2019t lead to such a deal, Mr. Putin has signaled that he is willing to fight on, using force to achieve what diplomacy cannot.<\/p>\n \u201cI have stated Russia\u2019s goals,\u201d Mr. Putin told reporters this month when asked if Russia was willing to compromise. \u201cThese conditions undoubtedly remain the same.\u201d<\/p>\n Recruitment<\/p>\n Speaking by phone from a hospital, a Russian sergeant named Vladislav rattled off the money he was waiting to receive after he lost his foot storming Ukrainian trenches in January.<\/p>\n The equivalent of $6,400 from the local governor; $28,300 from the state insurance company; $47,000 from the defense ministry.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the veteran\u2019s monthly pension of $1,100, enough for him to retire in his hometown in western Russia at age 33. \u201cYou don\u2019t even need to work there with this money,\u201d said Vladislav, who like other Russian soldiers interviewed, asked to publish only his first name for security reasons.<\/p>\n Vladislav said his monthly frontline salary had already allowed him to improve his family\u2019s living standards in ways he said would have been impossible in his previous job, at a sunflower oil plant where he earned $300 a month.<\/p>\n He is building a house for his parents and upgrading his and his girlfriend\u2019s cars. He is focused on providing a future for his children. \u201cWhatever they needed, I bought it for them,\u201d Vladislav said in July. \u201cWhatever they required, I gave it to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Hundreds of thousands of well-paid volunteers like Vladislav have transformed the Russian Army.<\/p>\n A recruitment billboard in St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n Photo by Anatoly Maltsev\/EPA, via Shutterstock<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s early military disasters in 2022 decimated the ranks of career servicemen at the core of the invasion, and the Ukrainians exploited the weakness. A September counteroffensive of that year broke through Russian lines, nearly thwarting the invasion.<\/p>\n Mr. Putin took drastic steps to avoid defeat. He announced Russia\u2019s first mobilization since World War II, officially drafting 300,000 men. He ramped up presidential pardons and payments to enlisted convicts, bringing an estimated 100,000 men from Russian jails to the front.<\/p>\n These measures stabilized the battlefield but at a political cost. The draft caused the biggest spike of social discontent in Russia in years. Hundreds of thousands of men fled the country.<\/p>\n But the success of the prison campaign gave the Kremlin a blueprint for a less coercive recruitment strategy, one based on money and appeals to manhood.<\/p>\n The government significantly raised soldiers\u2019 salaries, introduced lucrative sign-up bonuses, and rolled out myriad other financial benefits. Kremlin propaganda presented military service as a unique chance for men at the margins of Russian society to show their worth by becoming breadwinners.<\/p>\n Today, Russia recruits about 1,000 soldiers a day. The figure has stayed broadly stable since 2023, and it is about twice as high as Ukraine\u2019s.<\/p>\n Russia has consistently recruited about 1,000 soldiers per day <\/p>\n Source: Analysis of Russian Finance Ministry data by Janis Kluge<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s recruitment strategy has depended on the country\u2019s economic resilience. Even under the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, Russia continues replenishing its war chest from exports of oil, natural gas, coal and gold.<\/p>\n The reliance on volunteers has benefited Mr. Putin politically. Middle-class Russians have largely tuned out the war as fears of a general draft have receded, removing the biggest threat of protests.<\/p>\n \u201cThe larger the payout, the less sympathy fallen or injured soldiers receive from society, and the less likely are the protests against the war,\u201d said Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s ministry of defense did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n The military\u2019s strong recruitment masks underlying problems.<\/p>\n Many of Russia\u2019s best soldiers were killed early in the war. About 230,000 Russian soldiers have died since the invasion, according to estimates based on obituaries<\/a> collected by the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russian.<\/p>\n Their replacements are older, with less military experience. The median age of a Russian soldier killed in Ukraine in the first months of the war was about 28. It rose to 38 by August of this year, according to Mediazona.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was riffraff: the homeless from train stations, alcoholics, men running from the law,\u201d said another Russian soldier, Vladimir, describing his enlistment at a large Moscow recruitment center in 2024. \u201cThe health check was fictional.\u201d<\/p>\n The shrinking recruitment pool means that regional officials have to keep increasing payments to meet enlistment quotas, straining local budgets and destabilizing the broader economy.<\/p>\n The northern region of Mari El has spent more paying bonuses to new recruits this year than it has on health care, according to an analysis of Russian budget data by Mr. Kluge, the Berlin-based analyst.<\/p>\n Production<\/p>\n Far from the battlefield, Russia has been racing to produce more weapons, ammunition and vehicles than Ukraine and its Western allies.<\/p>\n The goal is to outlast the enemy through superior industrial might \u2014 and Russia has gone full throttle.<\/p>\n Mr. Putin has drawn on foreign partners, including Iran, North Korea and China, as well as a vast Soviet-era network of arms factories, to turbocharge the supply of everything from drones to missiles to tanks. He has sharply raised military spending, despite economic risks, to more than a third of the federal budget.<\/p>\n Ukraine has received about $70 billion-worth of military equipment<\/a> from its own allies in Europe and the United States, but the West hasn\u2019t mobilized its industrial base in the same way as Russia. Kyiv has also significantly increased domestic production, just not at the same scale; Russia\u2019s defense budget this year is about $170 billion, more than three times Ukraine\u2019s.<\/p>\n To bolster production, Mr. Putin has showered military factories with subsidized loans. He has changed labor laws to usher in night, weekend and holiday shifts. He has tapped vocational schools, foreign countries and even prisons as sources of labor. And he has moved swiftly, with top-down control, thanks to Russia\u2019s autocratic system and a defense sector still largely owned by the state.<\/p>\n Perhaps no effort has drawn more attention than the drone plant in Yelabuga, a city 620 miles east of Moscow in Tatarstan. There, a regional lawmaker has repurposed an idling \u201cspecial economic zone\u201d created for Western investors in 2005 to manufacture a Russian version of Iran\u2019s Shahed attack drone, initially with Tehran\u2019s help.<\/p>\n Production of the Geran-2 drones at the Yelabuga plant.<\/p>\n Stills from documentary on state-owned Russian television<\/p>\n Its founder, the lawmaker Timur Shagivaleev, claims that Yelabuga is now the largest military drone production facility in the world. \u201cWe\u2019re witnessing a technological revolution,\u201d Mr. Shagivaleev told Russian state television in July. \u201cWarfare is becoming unmanned.\u201d<\/p>\n The plant did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n In the state television program, Mr. Shagivaleev wore a jumpsuit with an arm patch of a Soviet flag as he walked through rows of black drones standing upright along white walls. The scene matched the aesthetics of the early Star Wars films, albeit with reproductions of Stalinist propaganda on display.<\/p>\n One of the posters read: \u201cKurchatov, Korolev and Stalin are in your DNA,\u201d a reference to the Soviet scientists credited with Moscow\u2019s atomic bomb and rocket programs, and the dictator who raised industrial production through mass terror.<\/p>\n A poster inside the Yelabuga drone production plant.<\/p>\n Still from documentary on state-owned Russian television<\/p>\n To fill its shifts, Yelabuga has looked for workers in local schools and abroad. When Ukraine attacked the plant with its own drones in April 2024, Russian state news reported that citizens of Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Congo, Kenya, Nigeria and South Sudan were among the injured.<\/p>\n A technical college associated with the facility trains teenagers in specialist tasks. \u201cThe pupils are called in after the ninth grade, and after college, they are invited to stay,\u201d said the presenter of the state television documentary.<\/p>\n Yelabuga\u2019s scientists have reengineered the Iranian models to improve them. The Russian version, the Geran-2, flies higher and carries more explosives. It is now Russia\u2019s main weapon in its bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities.<\/p>\n Russia has tripled production of the Geran-2 since 2023 and makes about 80 a day, according to The Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research organization with ties to the British defense ministry, known as RUSI.<\/p>\n Russia has used its increased supply of drones to drastically escalate its bombing campaign, launching an average of 200 drones every night in July and once topping more than 700. Early in the war, Russia\u2019s biggest attacks included 40 drones, according to RUSI.<\/p>\n Russian strike drones fired at Ukraine per week <\/p>\n Source: New York Times analysis of Ukrainian Air Force statements<\/p>\n Data compiled by Kim Barker and Saurabh Datar<\/p>\n Russia has also breathed new life into underused Soviet defense factories to bolster conventional weapon production and modify Communist-era equipment.<\/p>\n