Putin Orders a Sharp Expansion of Russia’s Hard-Hit Armed Forces

President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a reversal of years of efforts by the Kremlin to slim down a bloated military and the latest sign that he is bracing for a long war in Ukraine, where Russia has suffered heavy losses.

The decree, stamped by the president’s office and posted on the Kremlin website, raised the target number of active-duty service members by about 137,000, to 1.15 million, as of January of next year, and ordered the government to set aside money to pay for the increase.

It was the first time in five years that Mr. Putin had issued an order changing the overall head count of the Russian armed forces. Officials offered no explanation for the move, and there was little mention of it on state television.

Mr. Putin acted at a time when he appears as far as ever from his goal of bringing all or most of Ukraine back into the Russian fold, and as his military is struggling with its manpower. Since his invasion began in February, U.S. and British military officials estimate, Russia has suffered up to 80,000 casualties, including both deaths and injuries. Those losses and the lack of movement at the front led some analysts to describe the order as a signal that, after six months of fighting, Mr. Putin had no plans to relent.

“This is not a move that you make when you are anticipating a rapid end to your war,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “This is something you do when you are making some kind of plan for a protracted conflict.”

Still, military analysts puzzled over how the Russian military, without a major draft and having already tried to tempt and strong-arm potential volunteers, would manage the task of increasing its ranks so sharply.

There is mounting evidence that the war in Ukraine could stretch to next winter and beyond. Russia’s offensives in the east and south have slowed to a crawl and neither side has shown any readiness to negotiate or compromise. In Ukraine, a top security official recently warned that the war’s hardest days may still lie ahead.

“It’s going to be very difficult; it’s not going to be easy,” the official, Oleksiy Danilov, who heads the National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview with Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded independent news organization. “And if someone thinks that we have already passed some kind of Rubicon and that the rest will be like clockwork, unfortunately, it will not be.”

Looking ahead, Ukraine’s leaders have tried to keep their Western backers unified — and sending weapons and money — and on Thursday President Biden reaffirmed his support in a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, White House officials said in a statement. But Mr. Zelensky’s military has not regained significant territory in recent weeks, despite a series of high-profile strikes far behind enemy lines.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has said that it was slowing the pace of its military campaign — a reflection, Western military analysts say, of the Kremlin’s need to explain the lack of military progress at home after going weeks without gaining significant new ground.

But Moscow continues to rain rocket strikes around Ukraine, including on Wednesday, when two dozen people were killed in an attack on a train station in the east. And U.S. officials have warned that Moscow may soon try to stage sham referendums in Russian-occupied regions, like the one held in Crimea in 2014, that are designed to provide a veil of legitimacy as Moscow moves to seal its control, through either annexation or propping up proxy forces.

Mr. Putin said this month that his troops were “liberating” eastern Ukraine “step by step,” even as pro-war commentators in Russia have been urging him to escalate the intensity of the fighting, and mobilize more of the country’s resources to do it.

The calls for escalation grew louder this week after the car bombing outside Moscow that killed Daria Dugina, an ultranationalist commentator, and Ukrainian sabotage and drone attacks well behind the front line in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Amid those demands for aggressive action and the Kremlin’s insistence that the fighting is going according to plan, analysts have been struggling to game out Mr. Putin’s next move: Is he preparing to increase the intensity of the campaign, maintain it at its current pace, or look for a way to end the war?

Most Russia analysts acknowledge that trying to predict Mr. Putin, a former Soviet K.G.B. officer who spent most of the pandemic cloistered even from his closest advisers, is a speculative challenge that rarely involves much evidence to assess. But Thursday’s decree about expanding the size of the army suggested that Mr. Putin was prepared to continue the war, though it was unclear how the military would achieve his goal.

“It’s a troubling announcement,” Ms. Massicot said, “but I question their ability to see it through.”

Under Mr. Putin, officials have tried to transform the Russian Army from a Soviet-era military reliant on conscripts to a professional fighting force more akin to Western militaries. The Defense Ministry worked for years to recruit contract soldiers, while reducing the length of required military service for men ages 18 to 27, to one year.

The Kremlin has insisted that only contract soldiers and volunteers are part of the Russian force fighting in Ukraine, continuing to refer to the war as only a “special military operation.” Men from occupied areas of Ukraine have been pressed into service, however, and reports have emerged of Russian conscripts being sent to the front.

“The order in my view does not necessarily presage a larger draft, or greater mobilization,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a research institute in Arlington, Va., said on Twitter. “It could, but it may be a way of accommodating the various current recruitment efforts.”

The Kremlin may plan to fold into its military the Russian proxy forces of the self-declared, breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine, he added, “especially if they go through with annexation” of those regions.

Mr. Putin has not declared any kind of large-scale draft, despite frequent predictions from analysts and Western officials that he would have to make such a move in order to replace soldiers who are killed and injured.

Instead, the Russian authorities have been luring people to enlist by offering them hefty cash incentives and other perquisites. They have recruited Syrian fighters and mercenaries to join the combat in Ukraine. And in May, Mr. Putin signed a law that scrapped the age limit of 40 for new recruits.

Analysts said that Mr. Putin’s decree enlarging the army did not necessarily augur a new draft — something that the Kremlin has apparently tried to avoid in order to maintain a sense of normalcy for much of Russia’s population. Instead, they said, the military could increase the number of young men who are conscripted at any given time for their mandatory year of service, or lengthen the duration of that service.

Some also speculated that the decree could be laying the bureaucratic and budgetary groundwork for incorporating other forces into the military — such as the battalions of “volunteers,” now fighting in Ukraine, from Chechnya and other Russian regions.

Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst, said the military expansion decreed by Mr. Putin on Thursday would bring the targeted size of the force back to levels last seen in the early 2000s, when Russian soldiers were fighting a second war in Chechnya.

Given Russia’s shrinking population and the ravages of the war, he added, it was hard to imagine enough conscripts and recruits being assembled to meet the target laid out in the order.

“The Russian army in today’s conditions can never be a million-man army,” Mr. Luzin wrote. “Especially with gigantic losses and mass departures in conditions of war.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.