Vladimir Putin wants Russian army to top one million

President Putin has told the Russian army to increase its number of troops to more than one million in a sign that the Kremlin is preparing for the long haul in Ukraine.

Putin has ordered the recruitment of 137,000 soldiers, taking the total to 1.15 million. It was unclear if the increase would result in more conscripts or a greater effort to attract recruits.

His decree, effective from January 1, will result in the overall number of military personnel topping two million and it comes amid massive Russian military losses in Ukraine.

James Heappey, the UK armed forces minister, said 80,000 Russian soldiers had been “killed, wounded, captured, gone missing or deserted” since Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February.

The Kremlin has admitted “significant” losses but has not updated its casualty figures since March, when it said 1,351 soldiers had died.

Russia is believed to have between 150,000 and 180,000 soldiers in Ukraine, including poorly trained conscripts from Kremlin-backed separatist territories in the Donbas. Ukraine’s army had 250,000 soldiers before the war started and President Zelensky said in May that troop numbers had been almost tripled though conscription.

Military analysts say Russia will be unable to make significant progress without a boost in its fighting power.

Putin has said that conscripts will not be sent to fight in Ukraine and the Kremlin dismissed speculation that it would announce a nationwide mobilisation. The Kremlin claims that Russia is carrying out a “special military operation”, rather than fighting a fully fledged war.

Posters urging Russian men aged between 18 and 59 to sign up with the military to “defend the motherland” have been spotted on neighbourhood noticeboards, buses and even in Russian Orthodox Church premises.

 “Join the ranks of Russian patriots!” read an advert on a bus in Voronezh, in central Russia. It said men who signed up would get a 100,000 rouble (£1,400) bonus and 256,000 roubles a month, five times the average wage.

The relatives of newly recruited soldiers who have died in Ukraine have complained that they were sent straight to the front without adequate preparation. Some prisoners have been offered full pardons if they agree to fight.

A significant number of the Russian soldiers who have died in the war are from Buryatia and Dagestan, remote and impoverished regions whose populations are dominated by ethnic minority groups. Analysts say the Kremlin is concerned that anti-war sentiment could grow if large numbers of young men from Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia’s richest cities, start coming home in body bags.

Putin’s move came as Russia admitted launching an Iskander cruise missile at a railway station in Ukraine on Wednesday, killing 25 people, including two children. The defence ministry said, however, that it had hit a military train and killed more than 200 Ukrainian servicemen.

It did not provide evidence to support the claim. Images showed burnt-out carriages that had been blown off the rails, as well as the remains of civilian vehicles.

The attack on Chaplino railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk region was on Ukrainian Independence Day and coincided with a visit to Kyiv by Boris Johnson. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a presidential aide, said the death toll included an 11-year-old boy who was killed when a missile struck a nearby building and a six-year-old who died in a car close to the railway tracks.

Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, called the strike a “heinous attack by Russia on civilians”, and said those responsible would be held accountable.

Moscow said it had targeted military hardware that was being transported to the front. It also claimed to have destroyed eight Ukrainian fighter planes in strikes on airbases in the Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions. If verified, this would be one of the Ukrainian air force’s heaviest losses in recent weeks.

As the Kremlin looks to tighten its grip on occupied territories, Putin ordered one-off cash payments to the parents of children who attend schools in Russian-held areas of the Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhya regions. He said the parents would receive 10,000 roubles (£141) if their children registered for school by mid-September.

Russia is using a mix of financial incentives and threats to try and ensure that classrooms are full when schools reopen. Pro-Moscow officials are said to have warned that they will remove children from their homes if their parents refuse to send them to Russian-run schools, where they will have to study a Kremlin-approved curriculum.

• The Kremlin is attempting to purge all opposition candidates from ballots before local elections that are seen as a referendum on the war in Ukraine.

At least nine have been hit with criminal charges and dozens have been prevented from standing after being charged with “extremism”. Others have been targeted physically by thugs: Sergey Burtsev, a left-wing politician in Moscow, was attacked and is in hospital with a spinal fracture.

The elections, including for regional governors, will take place next month. Many opposition candidates have been barred over old social media posts showing support for Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Kremlin critic. The Kremlin began an unprecedent crackdown on all forms of dissent after the invasion of Ukraine in February.