Russia will turn to contractual army at 450 thousand people

Russian intends to turn to contractual army, consisting of approximately 450 thousand servicemen, the Chairman of the Russian Government Vladimir Putin stated at the all-Russian agrarian forum in Ufa.

As he said, at present time it is too difficult to form such army in Russia due to several factors: first, the service life period is restricted just to 12 months; second within the period between1992-2002 the country was facing great demographic gap, which after-effects it will experience still for rather long period of time. Though death rate dropped and birth rate is going up, it doesn’t mean that the demographic problem can be overcome soon. It means we won’t have enough young people for recruitment.

The third problem is that there are many categories of people in the country, which can’t be recruited – dancers, musicians, priests, workers of Russian industrial-defense complex etc. All these factors directly affect our defensive capacity and it means that we should have a transition period for turning to really professional contractual army.