Russia’s army recruited more than 430,000 new troops this year amid its war in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin said.

“This stream of volunteers doesn’t stop,” Putin told a meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow on Monday. “A turning point on the frontlines has been reached and we have completely taken the strategic initiative,” he said, an apparent reference to recent costly battlefield advances.

Putin said the numbers signing contracts to join the army had increased from 300,000 in 2023. It wasn’t possible to independently verify the figures.

Neither Putin nor Defense Minister Andrey Belousov mentioned Russian casualties at the meeting. The U.S. and and its NATO allies say at least 700,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the February 2022 invasion began, roughly equal to Putin’s recruitment figures for the past two years. Russia doesn’t publish its casualty numbers.

Russian officials have responded to mounting troop losses by sharply increasing recruitment bonuses to persuade volunteers to join the war in Ukraine. That’s as the Kremlin has been eager to avoid a repeat of the unpopular September 2022 mobilization of 300,000 reservists.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month that 43,000 of its troops have been killed since the start of the war and 370,000 have been wounded.

Russian forces have been advancing along the front line in eastern Ukraine in recent months, though Kyiv’s Western allies say this is coming at a cost to Moscow of record average daily casualties.

Belousov said Russian troops have captured about 4,500 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory this year.

That’s much more than shown in Bloomberg Economics’ calculations based on changes in territorial control recorded by the DeepState mapping service that’s maintained in cooperation with the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. These indicate that Russia gained nearly 3,100 square kilometers of territory since the start of 2024.