Russia has been undergoing a constant expansion of its armed forces since last autumn. The government says they don’t expect to need to implement any kind of conscription because they get thousands of new volunteer contract soldiers signing up every day. Plus there are always more reservists that could be called up if the need should arise. That being said this is still, even now, an economy of force operation.
Ukraine most certainly does not have 40 million people, it did not even have that many before 2014. I would be surprised if they even have half that. They lost a big chunk when Crimea, the DPR and LPR split, and yet another last year from the new oblasts that were incorporated into Russia. The eastern regions were not only the most industrialized but also the most populated with the exception of Kiev itself.
Okay. Thousands of new soldiers a day (so ~1 million a year) is more than enough.
There’s some hyperbole there, it’s probably more like a thousand, some days maybe more, some days less. They already called up 300k reservists and with another 300k from new volunteer professional contract soldiers they will probably get to a million by the end of the year. That is not to say that all or even most of those will be deployed to Ukraine. As i said, Russia is still conducting an economy of force operation, i would be surprised if they have more than 300k in the entire theater right now, and as long as they don’t want to make any big spectacular pushes that is more than enough to continue demilitarizing Ukraine (and NATO) and slowly grinding forward. The rest of the newly constituted forces will be deployed to reinforce other sectors where there is a risk of direct conflict with NATO, Belarus, the Finnish border, Kaliningrad, Pskov, etc. Don’t expect to see WWII style big arrow offensives and mass assaults from Russia.
