Russian regional authorities are demanding that companies supply people for the war in Ukraine, the independent Russian television network TV Rain has found. The broadcaster obtained a document titled “Plan for Selecting Candidates for Contract Service in 2026” for the Muisky district of Buryatia.
A source close to the republic’s administration gave the document to TV Rain. The Muisky district is just one example, the source said — the same scheme operates across Russia.
The document lists how many people work at each company, how many of them are men between the ages of 20 and 60, and how many must be sent to war.
The district chief “receives a quota from the republican headquarters, and the local headquarters allocates it across employers, specifying how many workers each must surrender,” the source said.
Companies unwilling to send employees to war can instead sign a contract with an unnamed firm for “candidate selection for the SVO” — the acronym for the “special military operation,” Russia’s official term for the war — at a cost of 100,000 rubles, the source said. For local businesses, TV Rain notes, that is an enormous sum.
State-funded institutions are also being required to supply workers for the war. Under the “Plan for Selecting Candidates for Contract Service in 2026,” the district hospital must provide two employees — even though Buryatia is short of medical personnel, TV Rain notes.
A businessman from Siberia described the same scheme to the broadcaster. Authorities first demanded that entrepreneurs hand over people for the war in 2024, he said, threatening them with “surprise inspections.” By 2025, he said, a “buyout” scheme had emerged in which entrepreneurs were pressured into signing contracts ostensibly to find candidates to send to war, at 450,000 rubles per person.
Buryatia sends more of its residents to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine than almost any other region, and it ranks among the highest for war deaths as a result. Finding volunteers willing to go to war there is getting harder, TV Rain notes. “Everyone has friends or relatives who have been killed or wounded, and there are many disabled people,” the network quotes residents of the republic as saying.
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