Russian army faces imminent shortage of professional soldiers.

(From BBC Monitoring International Reports)

Professional soldiers are leaving the Russian armed forces in droves, citing low pay and poor conditions, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta has reported. One in eight have broken their contracts and left early; at a motorized infantry division in Chechnya the figure is one in three. Worse still, fewer than one in five of serving professional soldiers are currently willing to extend their contracts, the standard term of which is three years. The newspaper concludes that the effort to create a professional army is failing. The following is the text of Nezavisimaya Gazeta's report, published on 24 August:

The idea of creating a contract army in Russia is failing. Analysts at the General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, who have closely studied the latest data from military …