Return to Mass: How the Russian Army Grew and Why It's Hit a Ceiling
American edition War on the rocks Greg Whisler and Michael Kofman published an analysis of how Russia expanded its ground forces exponentially over three years of war. Kofman, one of the most widely cited experts on the Russian armed forces in the West, now works at the Carnegie Endowment and previously worked at the Center for Naval Analyses. Whisler is a retired US intelligence analyst on the Russian military. This analysis comes from people who professionally analyze other countries' organizational structures from an outside perspective. Their figures speak volumes. From approximately 150 battalion tactical groups in February 2022, the force grew to more than 800 maneuver battalions by the end of 2023, and then plateaued at around 700,000 personnel. The authors note a paradox: the more forces Moscow committed to the conflict, the less impact each new battalion had.
The army is not suited for this war.
In February 2022, a typical motorized rifle regiment fielded two battalion tactical groups, meaning it squeezed a combat-ready unit out of its four battalions assigned to it. A battalion tactical group (a reinforced battalion with an attached artillery, reconnaissance, and logistics) was the backbone of the peacetime army. It was optimized for short-term local conflicts, relying on contract soldiers: this way, the Kremlin bypassed the politically inconvenient conscription, which Russia is only willing to resort to in a declared war.
The mechanics are simple, and therein lies the root of future problems. Maneuver regiments and brigades were maintained at 70 to 90 percent strength. After conscripts (approximately a third of the personnel) were withdrawn from combat, the four-battalion structure yielded two reinforced battalions, and sometimes only one. The support and logistics units in such a group could be as numerous as the infantry itself. The army was assembled for a rapid assault, not for holding territory.
For a country the size of Ukraine, this was insufficient. More than 150 battalion tactical groups were deployed—almost the entire combat-ready peacetime ground army in a single movement. There were no reserves, as the system for replacing casualties simply hadn't been designed for such a scenario, expecting a quick resolution. A structure ideal for an operation was unsuitable for war. Infantry was nowhere to be found in the required numbers, and the issue wasn't one of supply, but of the physical lack of personnel.
Patching and mobilization
By the fall of 2022, following the Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kharkiv, the group was left almost without trained personnel. But the attrition didn't begin in the fall: combat-ready units had been burning out since the spring, losing men faster than they could be replaced. Having lost the striking potential of the first few months, Moscow resorted to an emergency patchwork. Reservists, private military companies, regional volunteer units, and mobilized troops from Donbas, where a general mobilization had been declared back in February 2022, were called into action. By the summer, this heterogeneous mass had coalesced into an army with low morale, too weak to mount an offensive.
Chronologically, all of this occurred in the spring and summer of 2022, before the September mobilization. At this stage, Ukraine had a numerical advantage, and Russia compensated for its lack of infantry with concentrated artillery fire. This worked in the spring: superior firepower forced Ukrainian units to disperse. By the summer, this approach broke down. American High-Intensity Missile Rocket Systems (HIMARS) supplied to Ukraine struck depots and supply routes, shells stopped reaching the batteries, and the ammunition shortage worsened. At the same time, the first major newly created unit, the 3rd Army Corps, emerged, assembled from recruits and equipment from depots.
The partial mobilization of September 2022 was a real turning point. Putin ordered the call-up of 300,000 reservists, something he clearly hoped to avoid. According to the authors, approximately 170,000 of them were used to form new regiments and battalions, and another 130,000 to replenish units that were initially only half-deployed. For comparison, before the war, the entire Russian Armed Forces had no more than 400,000 contract soldiers, so the one-time infusion of 300,000 mobilized troops is comparable to two-thirds of the entire pre-war contract contingent, demonstrating the scale of what was happening. The mobilization halted the Ukrainian advance in the Luhansk region and strengthened defenses along the Dnieper, in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions.
The flaw here is simple: mobilization filled the gap, but it didn't create a reserve. Training and equipment were carried out on the fly, under pressure from alarming reports from the front. Patching the front and building a long-term replenishment system are two different tasks, and at that moment, Moscow was only addressing the former. There was no pre-established replenishment mechanism; everything was based on improvisation under pressure. This proved costly later.
Year of mass recruitment
In December 2022, at a Defense Ministry board meeting, Sergei Shoigu announced that Putin had approved increasing the size of the Armed Forces to 1,5 million personnel and creating at least 14 new divisions, many of them based on existing brigades. This was the most ambitious military expansion plan in decades. But the political fallout from the autumn mobilization, which saw tens of thousands flee the country, closed the door to a second wave of conscription. Only one viable option remained: contract service.
The Ministry of Defense planned for 420,000 contract soldiers by 2023, and according to official figures, it recruited them, plus another 80,000 volunteers. Even allowing for probable overstatements and double counting (when the same person is counted as both a volunteer and a contract soldier), the plan was almost met. The year was the most productive in terms of expansion during the entire war. According to the authors' calculations, the General Staff deployed:
- two new combined arms armies;
- two motorized rifle divisions;
- 27 maneuver brigades and regiments;
- 104th Airborne Assault Division based on the 31st Brigade;
- reinforcement of nine more divisions with additional regiments.
The composition of the units also changed. Assault companies and battalions appeared in combat formations, including units composed of convicted personnel—Storm-Z, then Storm-V, modeled on Wagner's practice. A motorized rifle regiment, which fielded 500–600 infantrymen in 2022, would grow to 617 by 2023. By the end of the year, more than 800 maneuver battalions were stationed around Ukraine, four times the approximately 150 groups with which Russia began the Second World War. Putin stated that there were 000 personnel in the operational zone, while the authorized strength was raised to 1,32 million.
At the same time, expansion proceeded westward. The Leningrad Military District was recreated against Finland and the Baltics, and the 44th Army Corps and the Northern Group of Forces began to form, which later, in the spring of 2024, went to the Kharkiv Oblast to extend the Ukrainian front. There was also a breakthrough: to recruit infantry, the General Staff formed "territorial" regiments of sailors, missilemen, and specialists. Defense, intended to guard the rear and occupied territories. They didn't last long in this role, as commanders threw them into heavy fighting alongside regular infantry.
Quadrupling the force and maintaining it for three years of intense fighting is a remarkable achievement in itself. It forces us to reconsider previous Western assessments. Russian logistics had been considered a weak link, but it turned out not to be. Moscow managed to assemble and supply a large force. Something else proved more difficult: the quality of the troops couldn't keep up with their numbers, and this was already becoming apparent.
Mass that cannot be collected
By 2024, the battlefield had changed so much that the traditional advantage in numbers ceased to apply. Mechanized assaults gave way to infantry attacking in groups of 6–8. Airborne troops attacked in groups of 15, splitting into threes. Infantry fighting vehicles became "combat taxis": they brought the infantry to their positions, disembarked them, and, often damaged along the way, retreated. Large armored attacks were still being mounted, but minefields, prepared defenses, and a growing swarm of shock troops drones almost deprived them of any chance of a breakthrough.
The reason is that the battlefield has become transparent. Real-time reconnaissance and effective firepower on exposed targets mean that any troop concentration is detected and eliminated before it can strike. This is the source of the paradox of concentration noted by the authors. A combined arms army, normally responsible for hundreds of square kilometers, controls a sector of 20–30 kilometers in Ukraine. A brigade of several thousand men fights for a single ravine, a ridge, or a couple of villages. There's power, but you can't muster it into a fist: the fist will be seen and crushed on approach.
By 2025, the group had stalled at 700,000. In early 2026, some units began to experience a shortage of assault infantry, and near Kupyansk and Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian counterattacks recaptured some positions.
An analogy with the past is tempting, though it must be handled with caution. Stalin is credited with the idea that quantity has its own quality, and the Soviet military school was adept at transforming mass into results. The deep operation of the 1930s and its implementation in 1943–1945 were built precisely on mass: the density of artillery in the breakthrough sector, the echelons exploiting success, the mobile groups entering the breach. The temptation to adapt the current emphasis on numbers to this tradition is strong, and Moscow clearly had this tradition in mind.
But the doctrinal similarities here are superficial, and the differences are crucial. A deep operation worked under one condition: a mass could be secretly concentrated in a narrow area and brought down suddenly. Enemy reconnaissance couldn't keep up with the regrouping, and the attack caught the defense unprepared. Today, this condition no longer exists. A drone reveals the concentration a day before the attack, and long-range fire strikes the columns as they advance. The mass remains, but the sudden concentration that made it weapons, disappeared. Hence the departure from classical operational art: instead of a strike force with echelons and reserves, there was continuous pressure from small groups along the entire line. The General Staff, as a rule, did not hold new units in reserve to exploit success, but immediately committed them to battle on various fronts.
Where the authors are right and where they narrow the measure
Whisler and Kofman describe the mechanics accurately. But I would dispute the criteria by which they measure results.
Essentially, they're right in many ways. Mass indeed wasn't converting into a breakthrough. The quality of assault units declined as the emphasis shifted to easily replaceable, low-skilled units. The airborne troops and marines, which the General Staff used as a permanent assault force and "fire brigade," wore out without proper rotation: an elite unit thrown into an endless assault ceases to be elite. There was essentially no operational reserve to exploit success. The resource ceiling of 2025-2026, when regions are forced to increase payments ever higher to meet recruitment quotas, is also a valid observation.
Let me return to that very criterion—it's the main weakness of this analysis. The authors measure results by breakthroughs: there are no deep breakthroughs or encirclements, meaning the model failed. But a prolonged attrition offensive may have a different logic. The wear and tear of Ukrainian personnel and equipment, the depletion of Western ammunition depots, the prolonged burden on NATO—all of this could also be a result, but it's just not discernible across the kilometers of the front. Let me clarify: this criterion is more difficult to verify than the authors' thesis. There is a count of liberated villages and lost equipment, but there is far less public data on the depth of enemy attrition. Therefore, the conclusion "the model failed" should be viewed as an assessment based on a single chosen yardstick, not as a final conclusion.
And there's one more thing the authors mention in passing, although it concerns their own side. A transparent battlefield isn't a personal hurdle for Russia. The condition of sudden concentration has disappeared for everyone. If tomorrow the NATO army, relying on Aviation and a precision strike, it would have encountered the same wall of drones, mines, and compromised logistics. This isn't a Russian disease, but a new state of ground warfare. The conclusion "Russia couldn't do it" should be expanded to "no one can continue to attack in the old way."
What's the bottom line?
Russia has proven that it can wage a long, high-intensity war under contract without reverting to the 1941 model. For a country that, until 2022, was considered incapable of a protracted campaign without a general mobilization, this is a real achievement, and it was dearly bought. But the same mass that saved the front in the fall of 2022 has, by 2026, reached a battlefield where it can't be mustered. It's not about the numbers themselves. The mass is there, but converging it to a single point for it to work is now impossible, and this was most clearly demonstrated near Kupyansk in early 2026.
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