Mandatory military service in Russia lasts only 12 months and is required for men aged 18 to 30. To maintain troop levels, Russia has to rely on paid contract soldiers in addition to conscripts.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Putin is afraid to force people into service too often. When he mobilized a lot of Russian men left the country, to avoid the draft. So he instead pays a massive sign up bonus to get men into combat. However the economy has worker shortages already, unemployment is nearly gone, massive emigration due to migrants and young Russians trying to avoid the draft, lack of new migrants coming to Russia and low birth rates for decades mean that wages go up everywhere. So sign up bonuses are high. That is two years of the average Russian salary already.

So in a way he is forced to pay. The alternative might hurt the economy even worse.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I wonder what percentage of them actually get paid. I somehow doubt it's all of them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is what I was thinking, they won't pay out the full amount at least. So they'll keep raising it cause who cares, they're going to be pushing sunflowers up in a few weeks anyways.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

They are supposed to pay it out to families of the soldiers. But they skirt around that by simply not retrieving their dead and wounded from the battlegrounds, and marking the soldiers as unknown/missing, thus deferring the payments indefinitely.

There have been multiple reports of wives/widows trying to find out what happened to their husbands, or at least to collect the money, with the military admin stonewalling them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

A part is upfront the rest when you die I guess.