George Barros
speaker
576 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 6 Jun
George Barros’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, we got some data points recently that's suggesting, give us a nice sense of what the current Russia recruitment level is. So Vladimir Putin just last week mentioned that the Russians recruit about up to 60,000 troops per month. I don't have any independent confirmation of that concrete integer, but it's consistent with the other data that we've seen.
The Ukrainians have provided their accounts for the casualties aggregated over the course of a year, which roughly equates to a number similar to that. We know that in previous months, about six months ago, the Russians were recruiting closer to 35 to 45,000 per month, about a one-to-one for their replacement.
But then, of course, in his Senate testimony a few weeks ago, the commander of American UCOM, General Cavoli, mentioned that the Russians were reconstituting and generating forces at a faster rate than what most Western analysts had expected. So, this higher number is sort of consistent with those various different factors. But I want to make a very clear point here.
The Russians, in our assessment, are not going to be able to recruit 60,000 guys per month indefinitely. The Russians are employing some very clever tactics to try to maximize the number of recruits that they can get. And they're doing things like putting forward these insane, very expensive one-time recruitment bonuses, the current being about $35,000 to $40,000 a pop just for your signup.
And oftentimes, what they'll do is they'll employ them with these temporary surges. So, you're only eligible to get that signup bonus if you sign up, say, between May 16th and May 27th. They'll put it up there for like a week. And so, if you sign up during this time, then you can take advantage of that juicy deal.
And look, you can certainly try to squeeze the juice that way, but in terms of a sustainable training pipeline, a sustainable force generation pipeline that can do this for many years on end, this is not looking particularly financially feasible, especially as we watch the damage this is doing to the Russian economy and their sovereign wealth fund.
Sure. They're all being encouraged to volunteer, that's for sure, but they're not conscripts. In the Russian military, there is a mandatory military service, a lottery that begins when you're at the age of 18 and you are liable to be conscripted and serve for up to a year. Conscripts by Russian law cannot fight in Russian wars outside of Russian territory. The Russians have
made legal amendments to have that include the parts of Ukraine that they've annexed that the Russians legally define as Russia. So conscripts can't fight in Ukraine. And this is a big red line for the Kremlin.
In a few instances, scandalous instances where conscripts were sent to go fight in Ukraine, that resulted in some major blowback and some major instances of Putin had to find fall guys that he threw under the bus for that and families were compensated and all of that. So conscripts don't fight in Ukraine.
The Russians in their own legal classification, they have a class of service member that they call volunteers. And these are volunteers that are going to go by Ukraine. Now, the way that the Russians try to get the volunteers are multifold. Number one, they'll offer you tremendous financial incentives to go and volunteer and that's the way that that works.
But what they'll also do is they'll recruit from the conscript class. So, for example, say you're an 18 to 25-year-old Russian man and you're wrapping up your one-year compulsory service because you're a conscript. Well, what the recruiters will do is they will go to you and they will say, hey, you really want to sign this volunteer.
You want to now change your status and change it from being conscript to volunteer so you can go fight. And we're going to give you all this money and we're going to promise you this, that, and the other thing and try to make it look really good for you. And then that's how they get you.
There are also instances where sometimes the conscripts are pressured or they'll go after Russians that have debts, the remittances, they'll go after criminals too. A popular tactic now to get out of debts or student loans or be able to absolve yourself of a criminal record is go volunteer in Ukraine.
You're having problems with the law, well, you want to go to that court here, you could go volunteer to fight. And so, these are the various different ways that they get to that number. Okay.
It depends on the type of unit that they go to. Specialists get specialist training. If you're going to be a drone operator or a radio man or an electronic warfare engineer, you will get more specialized training. Typically, those are specialized conscripts that will be recruited for specialist roles. Those are really the very creme de la creme special sort of things.
Now, the vast majority of the so-called unwashed masses that just get funneled into light infantry, frontal assault, suicide squad sort of stuff, they'll be lucky if they get up to a month of training. And when you watch the combat footage of when they go and fight and how they're deployed tactically, I mean, they are wasted at scale.
I was just in Ukraine last week and I got a data point from a senior Ukrainian officer who told me that Ukrainian forces conducted 5,000 FPV quadcopter drone strike missions just in the course of one day. And those were missions that were being flown against individual infantrymen, against vehicles, against tanks, that sort of thing.
So, those guys are basically given a rifle and maybe some basic team or if they're lucky, platoon level training. And then at that point, they're basically just sent off.
Sure. It's ebbed and flowed in terms of the monthly losses, depending on the tempo and the different phases of the war. My current running assessment is that the Russians suffer about 35 to 45,000 casualties killed or wounded per month. It's roughly a casualty rate of about 1,000 to depending 1,200 or 1,500 guys a day. In terms of over the entire scope of the war, if I remember correctly,
The most high confidence assessments that we've gotten from the US intelligence community and the British Ministry of Defense are the casualties are somewhere in the range of 600,000 to maybe 900,000. I believe that's the rough casualty count, if I recall. But I want to be very clear. I don't think anyone actually knows. I'm confident that the Russian government doesn't know.
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