Faced with the continued erosion of Russia’s military position in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has chosen to double-down on failure.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced the partial mobilization of military reservists, a significant escalation of his war in Ukraine after battlefield setbacks have the Kremlin facing growing pressure to act.
In a rare national address, he also backed plans for Russia to annex occupied areas of southern and eastern Ukraine, and appeared to threaten nuclear retaliation if Kyiv continues its efforts to reclaim that land.
It came just a day after four Russian-controlled areas announced they would stage votes this week on breaking away from Ukraine and joining Russia, in a plan Kyiv and its Western allies dismissed as a desperate “sham” aimed at deterring a successful counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops.
Before this announcement it was apparent that Russia basically had no reserves, so a mobilization isn’t a surprise. Why admit failure when you can simply get more of your countrymen slaughtered for doubling-down on your own mistake?
Stephen Green notes that there’s less to this announcement than meets the eye.
It won’t be easy or fast to call up that many reservists, according to military experts, because Russia basically doesn’t have a reserve.
A 2019 RAND study noted that “Russia has paid little attention to developing an effective and sizable active reserve system that might be immediately required in the event of a major war.” RAND estimates that Russia has an effective reserve of only 4,000-5,000 men.
The country’s former army reserve units had been disbanded from 2008-2010 as part of the military’s modernization program, with their equipment — all of it older — going into storage or scrapped.
That doesn’t mean that Russia can’t conscript, train, organize, and arm 300,000 new soldiers, but it won’t be quick or easy.
One problem, as Foreign Affairs analyst Oliver Alexander put it, is “effectively readying and equipping these reservists. Russia already has problems equipping its professional armed forces.”
Then there’s the speed problem. Dara Massicot wrote back in August — weeks before Kyiv’s stunning counteroffensive in Kharkiv — that “Even if the Kremlin pulls all levers available, declaring a general mobilization to call up sufficient armored equipment and trained personnel, that process would still take time.”
That’s because with something like 80% of Russia’s combat power already fighting in Ukraine, plus wartime losses to their NCO and officer corps, the Russian army will need to train more trainers before anything like 300,000 men can be mobilized.
Just last month, Putin ordered an increase in the size of the Russian military of 137,000 troops. But as I reported to you then, Putin’s order only meant that “Starting next year, the Russian military will be authorized to find another 137,000 troops.” The country has long had a problem with draft dodgers, one that Putin’s “special military operation” won’t help.
He also notes the problem of obtaining new equipment. Even the first wave of Russian invasion included troops who were armed with ancient rifles. With the sanctions in place, none of that is going to get any better. Plus the fact that Russia essentially used up all their smart ordinance during the first stage of the war and that sanctions ensure they can’t easily make more.
Is there a Peter Zeihan video on the topic? Of course there is.
Some takeaways:
fundamentally changed,” but now they’ll be able to rotate fresher troops in, “and continue fighting the war more or less the way that they have been now, which is to say poorly.”
Nor are the sham referendums likely to make any difference either.
Russian-appointed occupation officials in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts announced on September 20 that they will hold a “referendum” on acceding to Russia, with a vote taking place from September 23-27. The Kremlin will use the falsified results of these sham referenda to illegally annex all Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and is likely to declare unoccupied parts of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts to be part of Russia as well.
The Kremlin’s annexation plans are primarily targeting a domestic audience; Putin likely hopes to improve Russian force generation capabilities by calling on the Russian people to volunteer for a war to “defend” newly claimed Russian territory. Putin and his advisors have apparently realized that current Russian forces are insufficient to conquer Ukraine and that efforts to build large forces quickly through voluntary mobilization are culminating short of the Russian military’s force requirements. Putin is therefore likely setting legal and informational conditions to improve Russian force generation without resorting to expanded conscription by changing the balance of carrots and sticks the Kremlin has been using to spur voluntary recruitment.
Putin may believe that he can appeal to Russian ethnonationalism and the defense of purportedly “Russian peoples” and claimed Russian land to generate additional volunteer forces. He may seek to rely on enhanced rhetoric in part because the Kremlin cannot afford the service incentives, like bonuses and employment benefits, that it has already promised Russian recruits. But Putin is also adding new and harsher punishments in an effort to contain the risk of the collapse of Russian military units fighting in Ukraine and draft-dodging within Russia. The Kremlin rushed the passage of a new law through the State Duma on September 20, circumventing normal parliamentary procedures. This law codifies dramatically increased penalties for desertion, refusing conscription orders, and insubordination. It also criminalizes voluntary surrender and makes surrender a crime punishable by ten years in prison. The law notably does not order full-scale mobilization or broader conscription or make any preparations for such activities.
ISW has observed no evidence that the Kremlin is imminently intending to change its conscription practices. The Kremlin’s new law is about strengthening the Kremlin’s coercive volunteerism, or what Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov called “self-mobilization.”
The Kremlin is taking steps to directly increase force generation through continued voluntary self-mobilization and an expansion of its legal authority to deploy Russian conscripts already with the force to fight in Ukraine.
- Putin’s illegal annexation of occupied Ukrainian territory will broaden the domestic legal definition of “Russian” territory under Russian law, enabling the Russian military to legally and openly deploy conscripts already in the Russian military to fight in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russian leadership has already deployed undertrained conscripts to Ukraine in direct violation of Russian law and faced domestic backlash. Russia’s semi-annual conscription cycle usually generates around 130,000 conscripts twice per year. The next cycle runs from October 1 to December 31. Russian law generally requires that conscripts receive at least four months of training prior to deployment overseas, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied that conscripts will be deployed to Ukraine. Annexation could provide him a legal loophole allowing for the overt deployment of conscripts to fight.
- Russian-appointed occupation officials in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts announced the formation of “volunteer” units to fight with the Russian military against Ukraine. Russian forces will likely coerce or physically force at least some Ukrainian men in occupied areas to fight in these units, as they have done in the territories of the Russian proxy Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR).
- The Russian State Duma separately passed new incentives for foreign nationals to fight in Russia’s military to obtain Russian citizenship and will likely increase overseas recruitment accordingly. That new law, which deputies also rushed through normal procedures on September 20, allows foreign nationals to gain Russian citizenship by signing a contract and serving in the Russian military for one year. Russian law previously required three years of service to apply for citizenship.
- Putin’s appeals to nationalism may generate small increases in volunteer recruitment from within Russia and parts of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. However, forces generated from such volunteers, if they manifest, will be small and poorly trained. Most eager and able-bodied Russian men and Ukrainian collaborators have likely already volunteered in one of the earlier recruitment phases.
- Local Russian administrators will continue to attempt to form volunteer units, with decreasing effect, as ISW has previously reported and mapped.
- Russian forces and the Wagner Private Military Company are also directly recruiting from Russian prisons, as ISW has previously reported. These troops will be undisciplined and unlikely to meaningfully increase Russian combat power.
Putin likely hopes that increasing self-mobilization, and cracking down on unwilling Russian forces, will enable him to take the rest of Donetsk and defend Russian-occupied parts of Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia oblasts. He is mistaken. Putin has neither the time nor the resources needed to generate effective combat power. But Putin will likely wait to see if these efforts are successful before either escalating further or blaming his loss on a scapegoat. His most likely scapegoat is Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Russian Ministry of Defense. Reports that Shoigu would accompany Putin while Putin gave a speech announced and then postponed on September 20 suggest that Putin intended to make Shoigu the face of the current effort.
Part of the mobilization effort seems to be banning airline ticket sales for males between the ages of 18 and 65.
That decree is every bit as popular as you would expect.
Takeaways:
Neither the mobilization nor the sham referendums change any immediate facts on the ground in Ukraine. It will take many months to take new “recruits” up to even the most basic soldiering standards. Or maybe they’ll just give them three days training and send them into battle with old rifles and old ammunition like they did before, with the same results.
Either way, it doesn’t solve any of Putin’s immediate problems…
Tags: conscription, Donetsk, Foreign Policy, Kerch Strait Bridge, Kharkiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mariupol, Military, Peter Zeihan, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sergei Shoigu, Stephen Green, Ukraine, video, Vladimir Putin, Zaporizhia
Sun Tzu said leave an escape route for your defeated enemy. Putin might use nukes rather than have 100,000 Russians surrender.
Bleeding Russia and Ukraine is a pretty inhumane policy for all involved.
Mariupol is a good target, but Putin must defend that entire length of rail & road systems which run through Mariupol. Any break in that supply line and both ends will contract. That supply line is Putin’s glass jaw. Keep the Kerch Bridge intact as Russians’ exit lane, Ukraine’s future asset.
[…] IS NO EXIT PATH FOR HIM THAT ISN’T BAD, SO HE’S PICKING THE SLOWEST: Putin Chooses Mobilization, Sham Referendum, Continuing Humiliation. “The Russians are now discovering that they’re actually outnumbered locally, and that with all […]
[…] Putin has nothing in store except continued abject humiliation, and an eventual ignominious death. Russia’s dwindling supply of young men are either being squandered in a pointless war of genocide and ethnic cleansing, or are being driven out of Russia by Putin’s own tyrannical antics. The very future of Russia is being bled out by Putin’s demented narcissism. […]
Said it before, and I’ll say it again: Putin is the worst thing that “happened” to Russia since the Soviet Union. Corollary to that? His irredentist drive to recreate the old “Penitentiary of Nations” in the 21st Century. Ain’t going to work, and trying to make it work is only going to create immense misery for anyone involved in the impending train wreck.
Say it with me, folks: Imperialism doesn’t work, in the long run. Imperialism destroyed the Spanish Empire, and eventually did in the other European attempts to emulate it. It also destroyed China.
Raw fact of nature is that “big” isn’t sustainable; you’re way better off with a host of small nations like Europe consisted of before modern times; you can fail, and fail small. The larger polity doesn’t collapse; if you go big, then fail? It takes everything with it, as in the collapse of the Roman Empire. If the Romans had left Gaul the hell alone, the barbarians coming in during the late Imperial period wouldn’t have found a hollowed-out defensive shell and a lot of soft meat within; they’d have run up against a bunch of smaller nations who were used to defending themselves, and whose ability to do so hadn’t atrophied from disuse.
Kinda the same thing that happened under NATO, TBH. One wonders what will happen to Europe once the US gets tired of its “international obligations” and tells the Euros to f*ck off. Probably the same thing, I think… Had Putin possessed the wit and wisdom to just wait another generation or two, then Europe would likely have fallen right into his hands. But, because all tyrants are impatient and given to an insane drive to “leave a legacy” in their own lifetimes, wellllll… We have what we have before us.
Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich” should have been a long, slow multi-generational project. If it had been, by now we’d likely be living in a very different world. Same with Putin’s ambitions–He is the essential parvenu, trying to rebuild a noveau riche Russian Imperial State with nothing to really base it on. His transition to a resource-extraction economy vice the half-ass Soviet industrial fantasy was doomed to failure, once he started going after his neighbors.
Meant to mention the old truism about Russian history, as well. “Russian history can be summed up as a never-ending succession of historians summing up some incident in their work with the phrase “…and, then it got worse…””
Putin is the living expression of that sad conclusion. Nothing he has “achieved” as head of state could be interpreted as improving the lot of the average citizen of the Russian Federation, and for the Russian ethnicity? He’s destroyed them, because the raw fact is that by the time he’s done, they’ll be driven out of every area where they settled during their long Imperial twilight colonialism, and likely exterminated wherever they refuse to leave. Sadly, doing so will be seen as necessary self-defense by nearly every right-thinking realist in those regions…
Even if Putin can get a fraction of the reserve back, they still need at least a couple of weeks of refresher. They need those trips 3 weeks ago.
Russian “reserves” are not reserves in the sense that anyone in the West thinks of when using that word. It would be a lot more accurate to use the term “former conscripts”, because they’ve undergone no periodic refresher training and are not part of any organized military force. Even the US Army’s Individual Ready Reserve is better-maintained, in that many IRR soldiers are constantly being cycled in for duty cycles. Hell, there are some IRR officers who are doing as many days on active duty as active duty officers… I knew a full-bird colonel whose only active-duty period was back in the Vietnam era as an enlisted man, and he’d accumulated more active time-in-service for retirement than many full-time officers.
Lot of people don’t know about it, but the reason that the Soviets didn’t intervene in Poland during Solidarity days was that they tried to, and the mobilization collapsed into an utter shambolic fiasco, with drunken call-up troops wandering the forests of Western Russia and committing mass crimes on the populace. Jaruzelski was waiting for them, but they never materialized and that was really the moment that the Soviet Union went down. They couldn’t get their units organized, equipped, or even give them refresher training. Hell, a lot of them weren’t even fed or provided with anywhere to live–It was straight out into the forest for them, while the current conscripts lived in what barracks were available.
The authorities in the Soviet Union covered the whole thing up, and moved on, pretending that things wouldn’t be exactly the same if they did do a WWIII mobilization. This is going to go the same way, only it will be out in public for everyone in Russia and the rest of the world to see in living color on all the mobilized smart phones.
I expect this to be the thing that makes Russia’s utter destruction visible to everyone, and create the chaotic conditions which lead to the dissolution of the Russian Federation. We may even see nukes deployed, when Moscow tries to force the various outlying regions to comply. It’s going to be a huge ‘effing mess, no matter what.
Consider this as a combined Polish Solidarity mobilization with that whole sequence of events during WWI that led to the fall of the Tsar. The results ain’t going to be pretty…
[…] Attacking so fast they won't know what hit them… « Putin Chooses Mobilization, Sham Referendum, Continuing Humiliation […]
I am amazed that Hunter Carlson continues his pro Russian campaign trotting out “experts” who tell us Russia is winning and the Ukraine is dead. They haven’t learned from their one week predictions nor the fact that Putin is facing massive resistance in his mobilization, not the Ukes.
Remember it was Obama who gave Putin the Crimea. I have no doubt just as Biden the demented gave Putin a green light he is doing the same in Iran. Just as Obama delivered hundreds of billion to Tehran Biden will do the same.
A nation confident in victory does not need to try and bluff with nuclear weapons.
Can anyone imagine the strategic consequences for Russia now that the mask is off? Also note the PRC has discovered it isn’t going to invade Taiwan.
Or that Biden doesn’t make policy in the WH. I can imagine the words of Nathan Hale, Cpt. Parker or the defenders of the Alamo and if they replied”unsure or it depends.”
America is doomed when Demorats hate 6 year olds wearing Indian costumes at Xmas but subject these same 6 year olds to men dressed up as women.
Logistics, logistics, logistics. The Russian military doesn’t have the industrial base to support Putin’s ambitions. The quick “Special Military Operation” is now a long slog. The mighty Red Army of the Great Patriotic War had US and British industry supplying many of the basics.
The Ukrainians have developed a fiery nationalism since the loss of Crimea and the eastern oblasts and are more highly motivated fighting for their homeland than the poorly trained and equipped Russians (I state the obvious). Western logistics support and superior weapons combined with NATO warfighting doctrine is working well.
This will not end well for Big Red.
It’s not just the logistics, although those are a massive part of why this is going to fail for Russia.
The bigger problem is the whole cultural situation within their military and the rest of the supporting civil/industrial infrastructure. The corruption ain’t going away; when the supply sergeants are all on the fiddle, selling the gear they’re supposed to be issuing the troops on the Russian equivalent of eBay? LOL… Yeah, good luck fixing that. It’s corruption from top to bottom; criminal behavior of all sorts endemic to everything they do. There is no way they can overcome all that, and its going to be brutally apparent before the end of October. I think the whole house of cards caves in on them by the end of spring 2023, with a surfeit of preliminary signs before then.
Any military is inefficient and only as effective as the lowest common denominator within it. There was corruption in the US military efforts in Iraq during the early stages of the conflict, but those were kept under control enough so that they didn’t influence operations. In fact, you could probably make a case for saying that some of the corruption actually helped get a bunch of things done.
But, we weren’t selling people body armor that they were supposed to be issued, nor did we fail to provide them with food and water in sufficient amounts to fight. That’s something the Russians are doing, right now. And, I don’t see them overcoming that with an additional mobilization of any number.
What I think is going to happen is that they’re going to mobilize and once all those conscripted saps show up at the processing centers, it’s going to be very obvious that they’re not prepared to either supply or train them at all. Once that happens? Don’t expect them to stick around for very long. And, if they do, don’t expect them to fight at all effectively. If the Russian Army of today can’t feed, fuel, or supply the troops it has deployed in Ukraine right now, what makes anyone think they’re going to suddenly pull all that out of their asses just because Putin signed a mobilization order?
This is going to turn into a shambolic mess that will do more damage to the regime than actually just withdrawing from Ukraine and surrendering would. My best guess is that they’re not even going to get these poor bastards into the fight, let alone supply them with what they need there.
War is hard, ‘mmmkay? Don’t start things like this idiotic war for Ukraine, and you won’t have your petty despotism fall apart. The Tsar thought he was going to win, fighting both Japan and Germany. We know how both those conflicts wound up working out…
Dumbasses. All of them. If you go to war for any other reason than that someone has invaded your ass, or you’re certain they’re eventually going to, you’re a dumbf*ck. I include G.W. Bush and the Iraq/Afghanistan thing in that appraisal, BTW–If he couldn’t guarantee that the US would stick it out, he had no goddamn business asking us to risk it all in support of some delusional program of “bringing democracy to the Middle East”. It should have been a pair of purely punitive expeditions focused on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, not some peripheral bullshit nobody was going to follow through on.
Dont care other than I want to see Sell-insky and his reproduction unit executed.
Or there worthless dictatorial dead bodies.
Either will do.
I aint for Poot.
I AM against every western POS Supporting that pervert and dictator.