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This is Svetlana Bronnikova from the independent media outlet 7x7. For more than four years, the Kremlin has been recruiting Russians for the war in Ukraine in various ways: offering prisoners pardons and promising students supposedly safe service and money. In June 2026, Russians learned that security forces in Penza Oblast and other regions had begun recruiting men by force and through threats, detaining them on the streets. Why did the authorities turn to covert recruitment methods, and how did Russians respond? Read on to find out.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

From Million-Ruble Payouts to Police Raids: How the Kremlin Is Changing Its War Recruitment Strategy

To understand what is happening in Russian regions today, it is important to look at how the Kremlin's approach to replenishing the Russian army has changed over the four years of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In September 2022, the Russian authorities announced “partial mobilization,” a chaotic forced call-up that saw the Ministry of Defense send around 300,000 Russians to the front in September and October alone.

In Buryatia, military enlistment officials mobilized between 3,000 and 5,000 men in a single day, according to human rights defenders. In villages consisting of just one or two streets, as many as 20–30 men were drafted overnight. In Yeravna, a district of Buryatia with a population of 16,500, 450 people were mobilized.

Military enlistment offices issued summonses indiscriminately, including to fathers with multiple children, people with disabilities, and students. This sparked arson attacks on military enlistment offices, protests, and a mass exodus from the country. According to the To Be Precise project, at least 500,000–650,000 Russians left the country in 2022.

Beginning in the summer of 2022, with the Kremlin's approval, Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and head of the Wagner private military company, recruited prisoners for the war on a massive scale, promising them money and pardons. Later, in June 2023, the state legalized the deployment of convicts to Ukraine and placed the system under the control of the Ministry of Defense.

At the same time, the Kremlin instructed the Ministry of Digital Development and the Ministry of Defense to create a unified electronic military registry. This made it easier for the authorities to track down potential conscripts. An electronic summons is considered served by default. Once it is issued, the recipient can be barred from leaving the country, driving a car, or conducting real estate transactions.

After seeing the potentially dangerous consequences of the widespread discontent triggered by the fall 2022 mobilization, the federal authorities changed their approach to war recruitment. In 2023 and 2024, the Kremlin focused on financial incentives. Volunteers were offered enormous sums by the standards of Russian regions: in some regions, one-time bonuses for signing a military contract reached 3–4 million rubles (around $35,000–40,000), many times the average resident's annual income.

By 2026, however, this approach had largely run its course. Most of those willing to risk their lives for money had already gone to the front, while voluntary enlistment had declined. The Kremlin then turned to new tools, ranging from the digitalization of military records and automatic electronic summonses to pressure on college students. The key mechanism, however, became financial incentives for recruiters themselves. Police officers began receiving direct cash bonuses ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 rubles for each person they brought in to sign a military contract. As a result, law enforcement effectively became a tool for herding people into military service by whatever means necessary to meet recruitment quotas.

“Manhunters” in the Streets: How Forced Recruitment Works in Russia’s Regions

The events in Penza Oblast, a typical region in European Russia whose administrative center lies 700 kilometers southeast of Moscow, became a striking example of this new type of recruitment. There, police turned to outright raids.

Police officers and members of draft boards began lying in wait for men at public transport stops, outside shops, and in residential courtyards. Men were detained on trumped-up pretexts, such as not carrying identification or allegedly drinking alcohol in public, and then immediately taken to a military enlistment office or police station. Once there, they were prevented from contacting their relatives, put through a sham medical examination within a couple of hours, and forced to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense through threats, blackmail, and physical violence.

Legally, what is happening does not constitute official mobilization. It is a disguised form of forced recruitment that exploits citizens' lack of legal protection. Under stress and in isolation, many people do not know that no one has the legal right to force them to sign a contract for voluntary military service, and they eventually give in to pressure from security forces.

Alexey Tabalov, founder of the human rights project Conscript School, which helps conscripts, military personnel, and their relatives and parents defend their rights in disputes with military enlistment offices, told 7x7 that this forced recruitment had been sanctioned from above. However, it remains unclear whether the order came from the federal or regional level.

According to Tabalov, the federal authorities may have used Penza as a testing ground for coercing people into signing military contracts. But it is also possible that the practice was initiated by local authorities, which needed to meet military recruitment quotas and report back to Moscow.

“What is happening is essentially a hunt for people,” Tabalov said. “Citizens are treated as a resource, as prey that hunters are paid to catch. And since, as we can see, local administrations are among those providing vehicles [for hunting people down], this shows a clear intent on the part of the authorities to support the practice.”

Penza Oblast was the region where human rights defenders documented the highest number of forced recruitment cases in the summer of 2026. However, residents of other parts of the country, including Rostov-on-Don and Khabarovsk, also reported isolated cases of coercion to Conscript School. It remains unknown how many people signed military contracts as a result of such raids.

Elderly Women Against Security Forces: How Russians Unite to Protect Themselves

Forced recruitment in Penza Oblast had an unexpected effect: it sparked grassroots resistance. In early August 2026, local blogger Stanislav Morozov created a mutual aid chat for residents of the region on VK, Russia's equivalent of Facebook. The platform is far from safe, but unlike many foreign services, it is not blocked by Roskomnadzor, Russia's censorship agency, and does not require a VPN to access.

Morozov told 7x7 that he deliberately chose VK for the chat because its core audience consists of older women: the mothers and wives of potential conscripts who may not be comfortable with complex digital tools but are highly motivated to protect their loved ones.

The chat has a rule against discussing politics or responding to calls for radical action.

“The chat is almost certainly full of police officers, members of other security agencies, and provocateurs,” Morozov suggested. “I ask everyone to be careful about what they say. Our audience is very susceptible, so I urge people not to react to unverified rumors but to send the information to me first so I can check it.”

Chat members have developed a system of rapid alerts and physical protection. As soon as someone is unlawfully detained in the city, an alert goes out to the group, and activists, most often elderly women, immediately head to the police station. There, they demand access to the detainee as public defenders and draw public attention to the case. Security forces, accustomed to operating out of the public eye, generally do not risk continuing the pressure in the presence of witnesses. As a result, detainees are able to return home with ordinary administrative fines rather than military contracts.

According to Morozov, in the chat's first 12 days, its members managed to protect one local resident. Police detained the man outside a shop while he was carrying a sealed bottle of beer, accused him of drinking alcohol in public, and took him to the station, where they pressured him to sign a military contract. After learning what had happened, the activists went to the police station and demanded access to the man as his defenders. In the end, the Penza resident got away with a 500-ruble fine and went home.

“It's lawlessness, of course, but thank God [he] wasn't sent to the front,” Morozov said.

According to human rights defender Alexey Tabalov, such raids on men are beginning to turn into a conflict between the authorities and ordinary people.

“This is already backfiring on the authorities themselves, eroding both their standing and the respect people have for them, while also diminishing the fear they inspire,” Tabalov told 7x7. “A person who has nothing to lose stops being afraid of the authorities.”

He also suggested that, having learned its lesson from Penza, the Kremlin would conduct any further mobilization quietly and covertly, targeting individuals based on lists compiled by military enlistment offices. The unified electronic military registry makes it possible to dispense with summonses altogether: officials can simply come for a person at their workplace or home. The authorities are counting on the process remaining out of sight, especially since once a summons is handed to someone, they cannot refuse to accept it.

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