Vladimir Putin spent his Monday making Russia better equipped to wage war, and harder to audit while it does so. With two signatures, he expanded the size of Russia’s armed forces for the fourth time this year, then pulled the curtain over the evidence that exposes the damage Ukraine is inflicting across the Russian border. Three days earlier, Russia's election commission said Putin's United Russia party had won a record 349 of 450 State Duma seats, cementing its largest ever parliamentary majority.
Forty-six veterans of the Ukraine War and other conflicts were elected, 41 of them for United Russia, to form a handpicked Duma crafted to carry out Putin’s bidding into the next decade. When Russia’s Finance Ministry sends its draft 2027 budget to parliament this week—one expected to introduce an eye-watering increase in defense spending—the picture will be complete. Putin is showing us he is prepared to throw the kitchen sink at Kyiv and hide whatever breaks in the process.
The first of Monday’s decrees increased the ceiling on Russia’s armed forces by 15,500. This brings the number of military service members to 1,550,500 and the overall authorized strength to 2,441,630. Russia’s armed forces have now added 52,500 positions since March—50,500 of them military posts—across four expansions in seven months.
With Putin still insisting there is no need for another forced mobilization, Moscow is turning elsewhere to meet the burn rate of its troops on Ukraine’s blood-soaked front lines. Ukrainian intelligence estimates more than 8,000 North Korean troops are currently in Russia, with another 10,000 being selected for training and subsequent deployment there, Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday. Intelligence officials also claimed earlier this month that roughly 25,000 North Korean personnel have rotated through Russia’s armed forces so far, after Putin publicly credited Pyongyang’s forces with helping to repel Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk region early last year.
As Russia’s manpower increases, so too does its firepower. Ukrainian military intelligence estimates Russia is producing 55-60 Iskander-M ballistic missiles on a monthly basis, alongside up to 50 RM-48Us—a cheap training missile used by Russian air defense units that has been repurposed into a short-range ballistic weapon. In theory, this means Moscow could fire around 100 ballistic missiles a month without eating into existing stocks.
Meanwhile, Russian forces launched an estimated 2,850 jet-powered drones into Ukraine last month, nearly double the total for July and more than eight times that of June. This trend shows no signs of slowing. Despite severe labor shortages in Russia and a battery of Western sanctions designed to restrict access to foreign components, Moscow’s defense firms have managed to expand their production, according to a July analysis by CSIS.
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