Ulyanovsk

• Instead, Russia is attempting to persuade thousands of men to enlist voluntarily as contract soldiers.
• The Kremlin’s recruitment campaign is designed to appeal to their sense of national pride and injured masculinity.
• But my research with working-class men – the primary targets of the campaign – suggest it is unlikely to succeed.
• And, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they left Russia in their droves.

Needed: cannon fodder

• The country has already squandered tens of thousands of lives in its disastrous war in Ukraine – including many of those mobilised in the autumn of 2022.
• The campaign shows it’s ordinary working-class men – most of whom have military training – to whom Putin is appealing.
• This affected working-class men more than any other socio-demographic group, with psycho-social stress, accidents, suicide and alcoholism all featuring highly.

A pragmatic working class

• Army service was framed pragmatically, as an opportunity to build physical strength and personal discipline.
• It was also viewed as a means of improving one’s earning capacity as a manual worker – literally “becoming a man”.
• An unstated aim of the current recruitment campaign, then, is to provide a veneer of consent for what can now only be achieved through coercion.
• Men will still be found to be sent to the Donbas, but few will go there willingly.