Gordon Chang

For example, in September 2022, when the Kremlin initiated the partial mobilization, they saw the crackdown on that.

And so I think the protest sentiment is a little bit lower in Russia just because the society is so different.

Yeah, so casualty numbers are difficult.

There's not a ton of reporting out there.

Really, the best we have is the Ukrainian general staff does publish their daily numbers of Russian casualties.

But the Russian recruitment drive is definitely a hot topic right now.

We are seeing that the Ukrainians are having effect.

The number of recruits that Russia is getting to sign up every month is starting to be less than or sorry, excuse me.

Yeah, starting to be less.

It's unable to replace their casualty rate.

So you have kind of two things happening at the same time.

You have the casualty rate going up.

The Ukrainians are right now really focusing a lot of their drone strikes on the front line at the Russian infantry, trying to boost those numbers.

So that's happening on the one hand.

And then on the other hand, you have the recruitment drive is slowing down in Russia.

So there's probably a couple of different reasons why less people are signing up in Russia.

On the one hand, the main avenue that the Kremlin has used to get people to sign up voluntarily for this war for the past few years.

has been absolutely humongous payouts, sometimes significantly higher than an annual salary that most of the ordinary Russians in some of the regions are earning.

So really high financial payouts.

Now, what's interesting to think about there is the Russians have been doing this for a couple of years.