When her recently mobilised brother rang from the frontline last week, Olesya Shishkanova recorded the phone call – and with it, a litany of complaints.
“They gave us absolutely no equipment. The army has nothing, we had to buy all our gear ourselves,” complained Vladimir, 23, who was conscripted as part of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation earlier this month.
“I even had to paint my gun to cover the rust. It is a nightmare ... Soon they’ll make us buy our own grenades,” he added in the call that Shishkanova uploaded on her page on the Russian social media site VK.
Vladimir’s story is far from unique. Across the country, newly mobilised men are buying up everything from thermal underwear to body armour as more evidence emerges that Russia’s undersupplied army has not been able to provide them with even the basics when they arrive at the front.
On Telegram, dozens of discussion channels have sprung up in which the wives and sisters of mobilised men share advice on where to best buy body armour and clothing for their relatives before they depart to fight in Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“From morning to evening, I scan the internet to find good deals for our boys,” said Anastasia, a member of the Help for Soldiers group, which is based in Russia’s Sverdlovsk region near the Ural mountains.
Anastasia said that the local recruitment office in Sverdlovsk “strongly advised” the newly mobilised soldiers to bring their own gear, despite statements from the defence ministry that all mobilised soldiers will be dressed and equipped.
For some Russians, the shortages in basic equipment feed the growing realisation that their military, lauded before the invasion as a world-class fighting force, has turned out to be painfully underprepared for the war.
“It is bad enough that our men are being taken from us,” said Anastasia, a teacher from Bryansk, a Russian city less than 100 miles from the border with Ukraine.
“We had to spend our monthly salary on my husband’s gear so that he at least has a chance to come back. Frankly, it is completely embarrassing. It is a mess,” she said.
The run on goods has led to shortages and steep hikes in prices across outdoor clothing stores and online marketplaces selling military gear.
According to a report by the business outlet Kommersant, prices for bulletproof vests have risen by 500%, and they are now selling for as much as 50,000 rubles (£710). Similar increases in price have been seen for helmets and basic camping equipment.
“Our stock is empty. Sleeping bags sold out two days after the mobilisation was announced,” said Aleksei, the owner of a hiking and outdoors shop in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth biggest city.
“We only have a few winter boots lying around and two tents. This has never happened to us before.”
What little gear that the army does issue to newly mobilised soldiers appear to be outdated or outright inadequate.
In one video circulating on social media, a mobilised Russian soldier complains that he was given body armour made for Airsoft games with no actual bullet resistance. Similarly, Vladimir told his sister on his call from the frontline that his unit had been given Airsoft gun scopes.
Even prior to Putin’s mobilisation push, the military shortcomings of the Russian army – on paper the second biggest in the world, with a budget of around £58bn a year – were painfully exposed as Moscow failed to achieve its goal of quickly taking over Kyiv.
After Russia’s 2008 military campaign in Georgia, the country’s defence ministry, under the Putin ally Sergei Shoigu, sought to revamp the army, aiming to transform it into a sophisticated, modern force while vouching to root out corruption.
But since Russian tanks entered Ukraine on 24 February, its military equipment has systematically faltered to a degree that has surprised most western analysts.
In an intelligence briefing on Sunday, the UK Ministry of Defence said that “endemic corruption and poor logistics” remained a cause of Russia’s “poor performance” in Ukraine. The ministry said the average amount of personal equipment Russia was providing to its mobilised reservists was “almost certainly lower than the already poor provision of previously deployed troops”.
“I am not at all surprised to see the mess that the army is in,” said Gleb Irisov, a former air force lieutenant who left the Russian military in 2020 and is now living in the US.
“The army has always been deeply corrupt, and those issues were never properly addressed. They didn’t spend any money on the personnel while our seniors were becoming rich,“ he added.
The opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his investigation team have published a number of exposés linking senior defence officials to expensive properties and hidden bank accounts, including a 2015 investigation into a £16m mansion purportedly owned by Shoigu. Other data indicates that embezzlement is taking place across all ranks of the army.
A recent investigation by BBC News Russian showed that, over the last eight years, military courts have issued more than 550 sentences for theft of clothing from army stocks. In total, during the same period, court data revealed that more than 12,000 corruption cases were opened involving the theft of military gear and equipment, with some cases occurring even after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The scale of Putin’s mass mobilisation has now exacerbated some of the already existing issues, said Pavel Luzin, an independent Russian military expert.
“Russia was just not prepared for mobilisation of this scale. It was doomed to have logistical issues.”
Luzin explained that, over the last two decades, the Kremlin has sought to overhaul its military, moving away from a conscription-based army to one that depends on professional forces.
“When mobilisation was announced, there was no mechanism in place to actually implement it,” Luzin said.
The glaring equipment and logistics problems have now become a problem too significant for the authorities to ignore.
On Wednesday, Valentina Matviyenko, a senior politician and member of Putin’s security council, ordered the country’s anti-monopoly agencies to regulate market prices for military equipment.
“The prices for essential items for the mobilised recruits have skyrocketed. It is not clear why, on what basis,” Matviyenko said.
Hours after Matviyenko’s statement, Russia’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, called on businesses to “quickly increase the output of equipment and technology” needed for what Moscow calls its “special military operation”.
