A senior Russian lawmaker who has been involved in a series of talks since the start of the invasion of Ukraine called on Monday night for the creation of a professional army of seven million to ensure that mercenary groups are not needed for the country’s security. Reuters reports.

Lawmaker Leonid Slutsky, who was involved in peace talks with Ukraine at the start of the 16-month war, said Russia needs a contract army of at least 7 million soldiers and civilians, in addition to the current army of conscripts.

“The country does not need PMCs (private military companies) and the like,” LDPR leader Slutsky said in the Telegram messenger.

“There are problems in the regular army, but the PMK cannot solve them,” he added.

At the end of 2022, Putin advocated increasing the size of the army from 1.15 million to 1.5 million servicemen, including 695,000 contract workers.

The creation of a seven million contract army would require huge budget allocations. Russia’s economy, battered by war and Western sanctions, shrank 2.2 percent last year and is expected to recover only modestly this year.

Russia was rocked last week by the failed uprising by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries, who briefly seized control of the military command directing Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine and then began a march on Moscow before abandoning the rebellion.

President Vladimir Putin issued a defiant speech on Monday, saying he had deliberately let the one-day uprising last so long to avoid bloodshed. According to him, Wagner’s fighters can continue to fight with the Russian army, return home or go to Belarus.

When he sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, Putin assumed he would capture Kyiv within days, but the war is still far from over, with the Russian military’s many weaknesses and internal disputes over how to conduct the campaign in evidence.