There is a five-year lead time on this purchase: that is how long passes before the first pupil sitting the weapons half of the course is even eligible for the one year of service every Russian man owes at 18 [3][8][17]. It does nothing for this year's recruiting round.
What it is sized against is a run rate. Western estimates put Russian army killed and wounded above 1.5 million [7] across a war the report describes as in its fifth year [5], which works out near 333,000 a year if you treat four and a half years as elapsed, against the roughly 400,000 recruits Moscow says it seeks annually [6], leaving about 20% of headroom over losses [18]. Or rather, the more interesting version of that arithmetic: the intake target sits close enough to the loss rate that the system needs volume every year whatever happens at the front, and a course whose first candidates mature in five years is being bought for that steady state rather than for the current gap.
The conversion mechanism is narrow and worth naming precisely. Conscripts cannot be sent to Ukraine, so enlistment officers and military instructors press draftees early in their year to sign lucrative professional contracts, which is what makes them deployable [9], and many young men avoid or delay the draft altogether [8]. So the classroom is not adding bodies to the pool; it is working on the probability that one particular 18-year-old signs. Put plainly, this is a change aimed at raising a conversion rate, and the cash it is meant to generate will not show up for five years.
How much of the programme is actually taught is partly answerable from the state-sponsored Knowledge Society's survey of more than 2,600 school leaders and teachers, where 95% of schools report hosting events about the war while nearly 75% report running special lessons on it [11]. That 20-point gap [19] tracks the cost of each item: an invited veteran is an afternoon, a rewritten lesson plan is a term, and the cheaper thing is the one at 95%.
There are a few ways to read this. One is that it's a genuine throughput programme, in which case the contract sign-up rate among first-year conscripts should move in the early 2030s. Another is that it's legitimacy spending, with the recruitment yield real but small. A third is that it's simply capacity-bound, since more than 80% of schools inviting combatants to speak [11] is not the same as staffing them as instructors, and Vyacheslav Volodin's wish for veterans in every single school [10] needs qualified bodies that a decree does not create. This is probably wrong, but I read it as the second reading carrying a modest dose of the first: Soviet schools ran gas mask drills, march practice and rifle assembly for decades under a deterrence framing built on 27 million dead [13], and Irina Lukyanova, a teacher who researches the system, is quoted in the Fortune report saying the ideology now is militarism where it was once fear of war [15]. What would prove me wrong is establishment tables: funded military-instructor posts inside schools, rather than guest speakers and Zarnitsa squads of ten with their drone operators and sappers [16], would mean Moscow is paying for throughput and not for atmosphere.
