Explained | How military service is sold on Russian TV

A supermarket security guard, a taxi driver, a guy at the gym. The Russian government has a message for all of them: Aren’t you a man?

And don’t you want to earn more money?

Last spring, the Russian military kicked off a new recruitment drive for the war in Ukraine, seeking to replace tens of thousands of dead and wounded without having to resort to an unpopular draft. For the last four months, The New York Times has tracked how the campaign played out on Russian state television and social media, and found that recruitment messages focused on the Kremlin’s official rationale for the invasion — an existential threat from the West against Russians — played only a supporting role.

Rather, there were frequent appeals to masculinity, sometimes voiced by soldiers’ wives and other women interviewed on television news. There were incessant reminders of above-average pay and benefits for military servicemen. And the messages — appearing both in video ads produced by the Defense Ministry and on regular TV newscasts — stress the ease of signing up, promising relief from Russia’s notorious bureaucracy.

The campaign appeared to start in April. Online, the Defense Ministry published a splashy video ad focusing on two central motivations: machismo and money. It defines military service as more meaningful — and manly — than what’s depicted as the Russian man’s typical, humdrum existence. After moody shots of civilians transforming into modern warriors, the ad ends with a more down-to-earth reminder: “Monthly payments starting at 204,000 rubles,” or about $2,000.

The themes in the Russian Defense Ministry’s recruitment campaign are picked up frequently in television newscasts — as would be expected, since all of Russia’s major television channels are controlled by the state. But the news anchors and reporters delivering the message are essentially acting as glorified recruiters themselves, repeatedly reminding viewers of the quick-dial phone number — 1-1-7 — they can turn to if they want to sign up to fight.

Since the invasion’s beginning, state television newscasts have been offering viewers a sanitized view of the war. Death and injury of Russians are rarely mentioned. The war itself is referred to with the Kremlin’s anodyne term, “special military operation,” or simply by the term’s Russian initials: “the SVO.”

But there are signs that, at least in some regions, the costs of war have now become too widespread to ignore. During a local morning newscast in the city of Irkutsk, in Siberia, on Aug. 9, a reporter introduces a piece about new “mobile” recruitment stands with an interview of a Ukraine war veteran wounded last year.

“I got all the payments that contract servicemen are entitled to if they’re wounded,” the veteran, Nikolai Karpenko, says.

“Contract military service, Nikolai says, gave him the chance to show that he’s a real defender of the fatherland,” the reporter intones.

The message: Yes, you could get hurt, but the government will take care of you. And you will have shown your patriotism.

The recruitment drive appears to have borne some fruit. The Kremlin has been able to keep its invasion going without resorting to a second draft, after mobilizing some 300,000 civilians last fall. And Ukraine’s counteroffensive this summer has run into fierce Russian resistance.

But analysts believe that Russia’s official recruitment figures, claiming that 1,400 people were signing up per day last month, are likely to be overstated — and that a second draft could still come. New laws passed this summer would make it much harder for Russians to dodge the draft if another was declared.

“Soldiers are not being relieved or regularly rotated on the front, suggesting there is still a manpower problem,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corp. who studies the Russian military. “It looks like the Kremlin is waiting as long as possible again to make a decision on mobilization, like last fall.”

A prime incentive: Money

Ever since the invasion’s beginning, the Kremlin has deployed Russia’s vast wealth to motivate men to sign up to fight — and to mollify families that lost loved ones. The advertised minimum monthly pay of about $2,000 a month, at the current exchange rate, is nearly triple the nationwide average income; families of soldiers killed in action are paid $50,000, enough to purchase a decent home in many regions.

One recurring state TV ad shows just how central material benefits are to the recruitment drive. Set to rock music, it reels off specific benefits like a “land tax exemption,” “compensation for household utility bills,” and vouchers for sanatoriums, or health resorts.

“Here, you’ll be treated fairly,” the ad concludes.

Television news reports follow up that message by emphasizing a streamlined process for signing up.

An April 18 segment aired on Channel 1, one of the main nationwide channels, describes joining the ranks of the military as being as simple as filling out some routine paperwork. It compares recruitment offices to the user-friendly service centers that the government rolled out across the country in recent years to streamline and digitize the country’s daunting bureaucracy.

“There’s an electronic queue, and volunteers are always ready to consult and help,” the reporter says, as the camera shows a young woman in a sweater with “Volunteer” written across the back.

Be a patriot, fulfill a childhood dream

The appeal to masculinity is pervasive, attempting to tap into deeply entrenched expectations of duty and service for Russian males. The April 18 news segment, for instance, refers to being a soldier as “unquestionably the manliest job.’’

At times, the appeal is blatant and superficial.

The same Channel 1 report featured a message from a man identified as a “commander of assault groups.”

“Here, you can find yourselves as real men, earn a fair salary, and make all your childhood dreams and wishes come true,” he says.

The message that service is a man’s duty also sometimes comes from fresh recruits and their families. The April 18 clip also shows three cousins boarding buses to head to training. The reporter declares that their wives, sisters and mothers “supported the decisions of their loved ones.”

One of the cousins says that his brothers, colleagues and classmates were already in the military and that “everything is going well.”

“It’s kind of hard to stay here while they are there,” he says.

Suffering peeks through

The realities of the war itself are described sparingly, if at all. On the nightly news, the action on the battlefield is often described in stilted roll-calls of “heroes” that don’t specify whether the men are still alive. In a segment from June 7, a sergeant is praised for having restored communications with his unit despite continuous shelling, while another was said to have “personally destroyed” a Ukrainian machine-gun crew.

But in some cases, the suffering of military families comes to light, even as state television attempts to cast the government as taking care of them. In the same Aug. 9 Irkutsk newscast that reported on new mobile recruitment stands, another segment heralds the opening of a new support center for soldiers’ families.

It includes an interview with the wife of a soldier who, she says, has had only one two-week vacation since volunteering for the war last September.

“It’s getting harder and harder every day,” she says.