Russian President Vladimir Putin signed yesterday, Thursday, a decree to add 137,000 additional soldiers to the armed forces, bringing the number of the Russian army to more than two million.

Putin's decree did not mention how the increase in the number of soldiers would be achieved, but he instructed the government to allocate the necessary budget for that.

This decision comes into effect starting from the first of next February and includes an increase of 137,000 in the number of army personnel, according to the decree published on the government's legislative portal.

Moscow has not disclosed any human losses in the war in Ukraine since its early weeks, but Western officials and the Kyiv government say the number is in the thousands.

After Russian forces failed to take control of Kyiv at the beginning of the invasion, they focused their attack on eastern and southern Ukraine, where the front lines have seen little progress in recent weeks.

The Kremlin has so far avoided announcing a general mobilization, a measure feared by many Russians.

The increase in the number of Russian military personnel also comes at a time when relations between Moscow and Western countries are experiencing an unprecedented crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Kyiv has also refrained from releasing information about the number of its soldiers killed in the war, but the commander of the Ukrainian armed forces said on Monday in a rare update that nearly nine thousand soldiers have been killed.