Russia's armed forces are being expanded to 2,441,630 total personnel — of which 1,550,000 are active servicemen — via a presidential decree issued Monday. This is the second expansion order since August and reflects the grinding arithmetic of a war now past four and a half years. The 15,500-troop increment is modest on paper but signals that Russia's recruitment pipeline (contracts, conscription, and foreign fighters) cannot keep pace with attrition without repeated executive intervention. The North Korean deployment is escalating in parallel. Zelenskyy disclosed that more than 8,000 North Korean troops are now on Russian soil, with another 10,000 being selected for training and deployment. Ukrainian and South Korean estimates put total North Korean troop contributions at 14,000–15,000 since 2024, most concentrated in the Kursk region. Putin and Kim Jong-un publicly acknowledged the deployments last year, calling the soldiers "heroes" — a rhetorical investment that makes withdrawal politically costly for both regimes. On the Ukrainian side, the fiscal damage is becoming structural. Prime Minister Sergiy Koretsky announced that reconstruction spending will be postponed because foreign aid is arriving late. The government is redirecting all available resources to "critical areas," a euphemism for keeping the war effort funded while infrastructure and civilian recovery wait. This is the textbook pattern of wartime extraction: future capacity is consumed to fund present survival. Russia's economic war continues through asset seizures. Putin ordered German retailer Metro AG's Russian operations placed under temporary administration — the same mechanism previously used against Nestlé, Auchan, Danone, and Carlsberg. The pattern is consistent: foreign assets are seized, local owners acquire them at knockdown prices, and the Kremlin extracts both political leverage and economic rents. This is not improvisation; it is a systematic transfer of Western corporate value to Kremlin-aligned domestic actors. The daily violence continues without respite. Explosions hit Kyiv early Tuesday; missile debris struck a residential courtyard; a building caught fire. Monday saw nine killed and more than 80 injured across Ukraine from drone strikes. A Russian jet-powered drone hit a Ukrainian village near the Polish border, damaging a border checkpoint — the latest in a series of strikes near NATO territory that have drawn condemnation from Warsaw. NATO's supreme allied commander, US General Alexus Grynkewich, told EU lawmakers that Russia's sabotage campaign in Europe — including an explosive-laden drone at a German airport and a Russian naval ship firing flares at a Danish helicopter — is "growing increasingly brazen" but failing to fracture allied support for Ukraine. Pope Leo XIV, meanwhile, urged both sides to sit down for dialogue, calling it the Catholic Church's obligation to promote peace and human life. The structural picture is clear: both sides are locked in a resource-consumption spiral. Russia compensates for casualties with army expansion and foreign mercenaries. Ukraine compensates for fiscal shortfalls by deferring reconstruction. European allies compensate for sabotage with rhetorical resolve. Nobody is generating new capacity — everyone is drawing down existing reserves. The question is whose reserves run out first.
