What Kremlin wants from Russians now boils down to two things: Men should join the army. Women must have more children. In recent months, Russian govt has doubled sign-up bonuses for soldiers to over $4,500 and blanketed the airwaves, social media and streets with recruitment ads.
At the same time, President Vladimir Putin has decreed that increasing births is a national priority, an effort that entered a newly repressive phase last week with a bill that would outlaw any advocacy for a child-free lifestyle with fines as high as $50,000. The two campaigns are separate, but in wartime Russia, they are two sides of the same coin: Kremlin's increasingly aggressive attempt to enlist Russians in reshaping the country to prevail over the West. For the short term, Putin's army needs more soldiers.
It is suffering 1,000 casualties per day, by Western estimates, in a war of attrition in Ukraine that shows no sign of ending. And for the long term, in Putin's view, Russia needs more people - to underpin an economy increasingly isolated from the West, to reduce its reliance on immigration, and, of course, to provide the recruitment pool for future wars. "The body is turning into a public good" in Russia, said Andrey Makarychev, a professor at University of Tartu who studies the relationship between the state and people's bodies.
"A woman's body is a producer of children, and a man's is the ability to pull the trigger and, in the end, to kill." Last month, Putin ordered the military to be .