President Putin runs for re-election next month with a few skeletons in his closet — at least 100,000. For Russia today, the rising toll of  dead and wounded soldiers in the Ukraine war is Russia’s elephant in the room. In Mr. Putin’s annual “State of Russia” address today, he warned of potential nuclear escalation if NATO intervenes in the conflict, but did not mention the British Defense Ministry forecast that a year from now Russia’s military casualties are on track to hit half a million.

Tomorrow, the funeral of democracy leader Alexei Navalny is to take place with parts of Russia’s capital under a virtual state of siege. Fearing  crowds, authorities denied a hall for a traditional wake. They refused to allow the funeral today, fearing it would distract from Putin’s speech. Police presence is to be massive along the two-mile route from the Russian Orthodox church in Mr. Navalny’s home district  across the Moscow River to Borisov cemetery.

Underlying Mr. Putin’s fear of the dead dissident is Mr. Navalny’s clear denunciations of the Kremlin’s war of choice on Ukraine. Although Russian authorities have blocked 250,000 websites, millions of Russians used VPNs to read Mr. Navalny’s prison manifesto: “15 theses of a Russian citizen who desires the best for their country.”

“President Putin has unleashed an unjust war of aggression against Ukraine under ridiculous pretexts,”  he wrote in the essay smuggled out of jail by his lawyers.  “There are almost no volunteers for this war, so Putin’s army has to rely on convicts and forcibly mobilized people.”

 “The lives of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were needlessly ruined,” Mr. Navalny continued.  “The ultimate military defeat may be delayed at the cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands more mobilized soldiers, but it is generally inevitable.”

If the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a yardstick, Russia’s losses in Ukraine would be intolerable in an open society. Last week’s capture of  Avdiivka came at the cost of  17,000 killed and 30,000 wounded Russian soldiers over four months, a Ukrainian brigadier general, Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, told reporters last week after pulling his own troops out of the ruined city. Prominent pro-war Russian blogger Andrey Morozov posted that 16,000 Russian soldiers died in “meat assaults” on the city. He came under such heavy pressure from Russian officials that he deleted the post and committed suicide.

By contrast, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Soviet casualties totalled 14,453 dead and 53,753 wounded — over a decade. The Soviet Union had twice the population of Russia today — and a much younger population.

Last month, the CIA director, William Burns, estimated Russia’s casualties — dead and wounded — at 315,000. On Wednesday, the Ukraine Defense Ministry clocked the casualty toll at 412,610. Britain’s Defense Ministry predicts Russian casualties will hit 500,000 by the end of this year. Russia started the war two years ago with a ground force of 360,000.

“The increase in daily averages, as reported by the Ukrainian authorities, almost certainly reflects the degradation of Russia’s forces and its transition to a lower quality, high quantity mass army,” the report adds. “It will likely take Russia five to ten years to rebuild a cohort of highly trained and experienced military units.”

On Sunday, President Zelensky told reporters that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the war. The real number is believed to be two or three times as high.

Both sides desperately seek to avoid another draft. For Mr. Putin, it is out of the question before the March 15 to March 17 presidential elections. Determined to suppress debate about the war, the government disqualified the only anti-war candidate, and ordered state-controlled press to minimize coverage of Mr. Navalny’s death on February 16 and to not cover protests by the wives and mothers of draftees serving in Ukraine. 

To minimize the impact on Russia’s politically sensitive middle class, the Kremlin has resorted to four tactics: recruiting prisoners, press ganging immigrant workers, paying volunteers five times local wages, and recruiting foreigners — largely from Cuba, India and Nepal. Over 120,000 male convicts — about a third of the pre-war national male prison population — have been recruited to fight in Ukraine.  Last October, Deputy Justice Minister Vsevolod Vukolov told a panel that Russia’s prison population had dropped to 266,000, from 420,000 at the start of the war. 

As the war stretched on, authorities started reneging on earlier promises to release surviving convicts after six months of war service. To encourage more prisoners to enlist, prison authorities adopt tactics ranging from cutting off mail privileges to turning off heating in prisons, according to the director of Russia Behind Bars, Olga Romanova. The army recently started recruiting women convicts, either to serve as snipers or assault troops.

Backed by its oil billions, Russia’s military also recruits men from poor nations — dozens from Cuba, hundreds from India, and as many as 15,000 from Nepal, according to news reports. Unlike the fabled Gurkha professional soldiers of Nepal, few of these recruits have military experience. Instead, they are often farmers or construction workers attracted by advertisements for military “helpers.” As dead bodies come home, officials in all three countries say they try to shut down international recruitment networks.

Inside Russia, police and military recruiters have raided mosques, markets and metro stations where Central Asian migrants gather. Although the governments of Central Asia’s  five former Soviet republics have told their citizens not to sign up for the war, detained migrants often face the choice of enlistment or deportation. In one of the largest raids, police at Saint Petersburg detained 3,000 migrants on New Year’s Eve. One was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. To encourage migrants to enlist, Mr. Putin signed a decree last month stipulating that authorities issue Russian passports to foreigners within one month of completion of one year of Ukraine service.

To further avoid the political liability of a wartime draft, the Kremlin plasters Russian cities with billboards emblazoned with big numbers. The numbers spell out signing bonuses for new recruits. Mr. Putin claims 486,000 new soldiers signed contracts in 2023. With these carrots and sticks, Russia’s president hopes he can have his foreign war, without provoking a domestic one.