Russia now spends more on signing bonuses than many NATO members spend on entire weapons programs — and by 2028 the Kremlin's hardest budget question will be whether a contract soldier is still worth his price when a drone costs less than his funeral. The answer determines how this war is fought long after any ceasefire.
Russia now spends more on signing bonuses than many NATO members spend on entire weapons programs — and by 2028 the Kremlin's hardest budget question will be whether a contract soldier is still worth his price when a drone costs less than his funeral. The answer determines how this war is fought long after any ceasefire.
The Price of a Signature
Start with the human input. By late 2025, a Russian volunteer signing a Defense Ministry contract could expect a federal bonus of 400,000 rubles plus regional top-ups that push the total above 1.9 million rubles — roughly $20,000-$22,000 at prevailing rates — before a single month of pay. Monthly wages run 200,000-210,000 rubles, several times the civilian median in the regions that supply most recruits. Death brings a presidential payment of 5 million rubles, regional supplements, and family benefits that Western analysts estimate take the all-in cost of a killed contract soldier to $90,000-$145,000 depending on region and service time.
Recruitment is holding near 30,000-35,000 signatures a month on Ukrainian General Staff estimates, enough to replace losses without a second mobilization. But the price per signature has roughly doubled since 2023. Tatarstan, Samara, and several poorer oblasts raised bonuses repeatedly through 2024-2025, a bidding war that transfers the true cost of recruitment onto regional budgets already strained by 6-7% of GDP in combined national defense outlays.
The Price of a Machine
Now the machine input. A Ukrainian first-person-view drone costs $400-$800 assembled. Ukraine's domestic industry claims production capacity above 4 million FPVs a year, with the Defense Ministry contracting through the Brave1 and DOT-Chain Defence pipelines at volumes that would have been science fiction in 2022. Russia's answer, the Geran-2 — its license-built derivative of Iran's Shahed-136 — carries cost estimates ranging from $20,000 to $50,000 per airframe depending on the share of imported components, produced at the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan at rates Ukrainian intelligence puts at several thousand airframes a month and climbing.
The arithmetic that matters for 2027-2028 is the exchange rate between these two line items. One dead contract soldier, fully costed, buys somewhere between two and seven Geran-2s, or 150-300 FPVs. One year of a soldier's pay and signing bonus buys a battalion's monthly FPV allocation many times over.
Where the Substitution Is Real
Substitution already happened in specific mission sets, and the honest analysis starts there.
- Standoff strike. Geran waves replaced cruise missiles and manned aviation for deep strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. No pilot, no crew, expendable airframe. Complete substitution. - Defensive interdiction. FPV teams now cover anti-tank and counter-assault roles that once required infantry with RPGs in exposed positions. Ukrainian commanders report drone units accounting for the majority of Russian armor kills in several sectors; Russia's Rubicon drone center reports similar economics in reverse. - Logistics interdiction. Fiber-optic FPVs, immune to jamming, have pushed supply routes 15-25 kilometers behind the front into the kill zone, doing work that previously needed special forces or artillery. - Reconnaissance-strike loops. Persistent ISR with organic strike has collapsed the artillery spotting cycle from tens of minutes to under five in well-resourced units.
Where It Is Not
The machine does not hold ground. Trenches are still taken and held by infantry, and both armies learned in 2024-2025 that a drone-saturated battlefield makes infantry *more* necessary in dispersed form, not less. Small assault groups of two to four men, moving under EW cover, remain the only way to occupy a tree line. Russia's glide-bomb tactics still require the threat of massed infantry to fix defenders. Ukraine's manpower shortage is its binding constraint precisely because drones cannot garrison a city.
There is also a survivorship asymmetry. An FPV that misses costs $500. A drone operator located by enemy ISR costs a trained team, a ground station, and months of pipeline time. Russia's doubling of FPV density has not reduced its infantry losses; Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties ran near 1,000-1,200 a day through much of 2025, with drones causing a rising share of them. Machines changed how infantry dies, not whether infantry is needed.
The 2028 Budget Equation
This is where the projection begins, and it should be read as trajectory, not fact. Three variables decide whether Moscow keeps the human-wave model affordable through 2028.
- Bonus inflation. If recruitment holds at 30,000 a month and the average signing package rises even 20% a year, bonuses alone become a $8-10 billion annual line — before pay, pensions, and death benefits. Regional budgets, not Moscow, absorb much of this, which is sustainable until it is not. - Oil. The federal budget assumed Urals crude in the $60-70 band; sustained prices below $55 compress the fiscal space for both bonuses and drone procurement simultaneously. That is the scenario where the exchange rate stops being an abstraction. - Drone unit costs. Alabuga localization is pushing Geran costs down while volume pushes effectiveness up. Every 10% fall in machine cost against a 20% rise in human cost shifts the marginal ruble toward machines.
Ukraine faces the mirror image: its FPV economics are superb, its manpower economics are not. European funding vehicles — the €90 billion Ukraine Facility framework and successor instruments now under negotiation — can buy drones indefinitely. They cannot buy infantry.
The side that runs out of money loses the drones; the side that runs out of men loses the ground. By 2028, both sides will be testing which shortage arrives first.
What to Watch
The desk tracks five indicators through 2027-2028.
- Regional bonus announcements. A plateau or cut in oblast-level top-ups is the earliest signal of recruitment stress, visible months before casualty figures move. - Alabuga expansion. Satellite-observable construction and Ukrainian intelligence estimates of monthly Geran output tell you whether Russia is buying down the machine side of the exchange rate. - Rubicon and Rubikon-style center budgets. Institutionalized drone units with dedicated funding lines mean the substitution is permanent, not wartime improvisation. - Urals price vs. the budget assumption. The gap between realized oil revenue and the finance ministry's planning figure is the master variable for everything above. - FPV-per-frontage density. When monthly FPV expenditure per kilometer of front doubles again, watch whether assault group sizes shrink further or recruitment targets rise to compensate. That response reveals each general staff's real theory of the exchange rate.
Russia now spends more on signing bonuses than many NATO members spend on entire weapons programs — and by 2028 the Kremlin's hardest budget question will be whether a contract soldier is still…