The short version. Bloomberg reports that Kremlin officials and staff at army recruitment centres have been moving assets abroad and urging relatives to leave Russia. At the same time, regional budget data show that paid contract recruitment — the mechanism that has substituted for mobilisation for four years — is no longer covering the army's needs.
Prepared on 18 September 2026, the first of three voting days in Russia's State Duma election. All assessments reflect that date.
In brief
Talk of a "second wave" has circulated since the spring, resting on unnamed sources, intelligence assessments and Ukrainian statements — evidence no outsider can verify. Bloomberg's report of 18 September adds a different kind of signal: the behaviour of the apparatus itself. According to documents obtained by the agency, senior Russian officials have spent recent months trying to open accounts at foreign banks and shift assets abroad, while advising friends and relatives to leave the country. Staff at army recruitment offices, Bloomberg reports, have been doing the same — the very people who would administer a call-up.
That shifts the question. Intent cannot be verified. What can be checked is arithmetic: whether the state can still buy enough soldiers to avoid taking them by force. Published regional budget figures answer that with growing clarity — it cannot, and the gap widened through 2026.
What emerges is a picture in which mobilisation stops being a single event with a decree and a date. Cash recruitment is running into budget limits, the machinery for compulsory call-up is built and operating, and intermediate forms of coercion — street raids, recruitment quotas handed to companies, detentions — are already in use. In that configuration a decree would not start the process. It would only scale it.
What the Bloomberg documents show
The agency published on the morning of 18 September, two days before the main voting day. Beyond the asset flight itself, two details tend to get lost in the retellings.
The first: a European security official told Bloomberg that Russia is preparing to call up a further 300,000 men by the end of the year. This rests on a single source, the method behind the figure is not disclosed, and it should be treated as an intelligence assumption rather than an established fact. European officials cited by the same agency add that Putin has not taken a final decision.
The second detail explains why the anxiety reached officialdom. Earlier in 2026 Putin ordered a 15% cut in the number of regional officials to ease pressure on a deficit-hit budget. The documents seen by Bloomberg record fears that those released from the state payroll could be drafted. In other words, the bureaucracy suspects that administrative cost-cutting and the army's manpower shortage meet at the same point.
Bloomberg also notes that, unlike September 2022 — when hundreds of thousands left the country — there may be no formal announcement at all this time.
The recruitment arithmetic no longer adds up
This is the verifiable part of the story. Contract recruitment can be counted independently, through federal and regional budget spending on sign-up bonuses. The German economist Janis Kluge has maintained that method for several years, publishing his calculations on the Russianomics blog.
By his count, the federal budget paid out 28.5 billion roubles in recruitment bonuses in the first quarter of 2026. At a federal payment of 400,000 roubles per man, that implies roughly 71,200 recruits, or about 800 a day. The comparison is unflattering: 89,600 in the first quarter of 2025, and 73,400 even in the first quarter of 2023, when the cash recruitment drive was only getting under way. Istories, working from the budgets of 40 regions, arrived at a similar figure of 70,500 for the quarter.
The point is not the decline itself but its price. It happened against the highest regional payments of the entire war: an average one-off sum of about 1.47 million roubles, with a median across 47 regions of roughly 1.55 million. Spending on intermediaries rose separately — in the first four months of 2026 alone, regions paid recruiters 3.2 billion roubles, more than double the monthly average of the previous year. The cost per recruit went up; the flow went down.
The picture had not improved by September. Between January and August 2026 some 234,000 Russians signed contracts with the defence ministry, 26,000 fewer than in the same months of 2025, with August alone down by about a fifth. Verstka recorded a drop of roughly a third year on year in the spring: Moscow sent 1,708 contract soldiers to the front in April and 1,378 in May, despite offering some of the highest payments in the country.
Set that against the target. According to the Financial Times, the Kremlin and the defence ministry set the regions a 2026 target of about 409,000 recruits. At the January-August rate the annual result falls well short — a gap that cannot be closed with money in the months remaining.
Casualty estimates, which are the usual explanation for the manpower demand, require caution: they come either from the Ukrainian side or from Western analysts, and are not independently confirmed. Military analysts surveyed by the Wall Street Journal in August put Russian losses at 30,000 to 40,000 killed and wounded a month; experts cited by Euronews gave a figure above 30,000 a month against roughly 27,000 new contract soldiers. Even at the lower bound of those ranges, monthly recruitment does not cover the losses.
Regions have started cutting payments
The most telling recent fact surfaced two days before the Bloomberg report. According to The Insider, Mordovia and Irkutsk region both reduced their contract payments in September, with Mordovia cutting its sum by almost four times; Sverdlovsk and Irkutsk regions had already done so earlier in 2026.
This reverses years of practice. Through 2024 and the first half of 2025 regions competed with one another, steadily raising their offers — the price rose because men were worth fighting over. Now some are pulling payments back to the hundreds of thousands of roubles, while the army's need for men has not diminished.
The reading in which regions cut bonuses because targets are being met runs against the budget-based recruitment counts. The likelier explanation is that the money is running out. And if a man can no longer be bought at a higher price, the only resource left is coercion — which costs the budget incomparably less.
The machinery matters more than a decree
In the four years since 2022 the state has closed precisely the two weaknesses that allowed hundreds of thousands to leave: incomplete military registration lists and the slow service of paper summonses.
The unified military registry became fully operational in May 2025 and is linked to tax service, interior ministry, medical and property databases. A summons is deemed served automatically on the seventh day after it appears in the registry, whether or not the recipient opens it — and the exit ban takes effect on the day it is posted, with no court ruling and no paper in hand. Since March 2026 rights groups have documented the use not only of travel bans but of a package of accompanying restrictions: on property and vehicle transactions, credit, and self-employed and sole-trader status. Conscription procedures have run year-round since 1 January 2026.
One technical link remains. The outlet 7x7 reports that certification of the software connecting the military registry to the FSB border service databases is due to be completed in October 2026. Until now some men have managed to cross the border even after a ban was registered; once the systems are integrated, rights advocates expect that window to narrow sharply. Alexei Tabalov, founder of the Conscript's School project, told the outlet that the registry is the tool the authorities could use for a creeping call-up.
Worth recording separately is what Western intelligence agencies told the Wall Street Journal in late August: in July, troops from St Petersburg travelled to Kaliningrad region to rehearse the housing, supply and arming of mobilised men. The paper's sources said similar exercises were held in other regions, while stressing that no decision on mobilisation had been taken.
Raids as the intermediate form
With no decree in place, the shortfall is being made up by hand. Over July and August rights groups reported forced dispatch to the front in at least 17 Russian regions; the Idite Lesom project logged 14 cases across five regions between 10 and 18 August alone. Men were detained on the street and at their workplaces, taken to police stations, and pressed into signing contracts — the episodes described by rights groups include beatings and threats to plant drugs.
Administrative pressure also works through legal channels: the governor of Ryazan region instructed enterprises, regardless of ownership, to find candidates for military contracts, and quotas have been handed down to universities as well. Rights advocates link the wave of raids to strict recruitment targets sent from Moscow.
That is the substantive answer to the question of whether mobilisation is coming: in a soft form, it is already under way. A decree would change not the nature of the process but its throughput.
The official word against the official statistics
The intensity of the denials is itself a data point. By Istories' count, federal officials have stated at least 17 times since 1 June that there will be no new wave; Putin has done so personally twice, Dmitry Medvedev four times. In Bishkek on 1 September Putin dismissed the reports as nonsense and an information attack on Russia, and spoke on the subject twice within three days in early September. Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said in August that mass mobilisation was neither planned nor expected. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov attributed the talk to Ukrainian attempts to unsettle Russian society.
A denial on its own proves nothing: the authorities would deny preparations either way. But the frequency indicates that the subject is treated as politically dangerous on the eve of the vote — consistent with Western sources' assessment that any decision is being held back until the election is over.
Ukrainian assessments belong in a separate category. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in August that Russia was preparing a wave immediately after the vote, and military intelligence has cited a figure of around 600,000 men over two years. These come from a party to the war and are not independently confirmed.
What is established, and what remains supposition
Established: contract recruitment fell through 2026 even as the cost of each recruit hit record highs, as the budget figures show. Some regions have begun cutting payments. The annual target reported by the Financial Times is not being met at current rates. The digital conscription infrastructure is operational, registry-based restrictions are being applied, and integration with border databases is expected in October. Coercive recruitment has been documented by rights groups in at least 17 regions. And Bloomberg, citing documents, reports asset flight by officials and recruitment-office staff.
Supposition covers the decisive part: the decision itself. The figure of 300,000 by year-end rests on a single Bloomberg interlocutor and cannot be checked; European sources cited by the same agency say no choice has been made. The military logic of an autumn decree is not self-evident either. Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment has noted that a new wave would more likely affect the front in 2027, since winter slows the fighting and training takes months.
If the trends hold — recruitment continuing to sag, and regional budgets unable to restore the old payments — the state's choice will not be between mobilisation and no mobilisation, but between the loud form and the quiet one. For now the observable behaviour of the apparatus points to the latter: the machinery that needs no announcement is already switched on, and those who would have to operate it are insuring their own families.
Sources
Bloomberg; Meduza; The Moscow Times; Istories; Novaya Gazeta Europe; The Insider; Verstka; The Wall Street Journal; Financial Times; Euronews; 7x7 — Horizontal Russia; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; the Russianomics blog (Janis Kluge); the rights projects Idite Lesom and Conscript's School.
Recruitment and casualty estimates differ between sources; data from parties to the conflict and intelligence assessments are not independently verified and are flagged as such in the text. This article reflects the situation as of 18 September 2026.