At lot of details of how Russia will carry out its projected 300,000 man mobilization discussed yesterday are unclear. Binkov’s Battlegrounds, which covers a lot of different military topics, discusses some of the details about how it would (theoretically) be carried out.
Takeaways:
“Officially, Putin said mobilization will draw on reservists: only those who served in the armed forces with a certain experience. He further stated those called upon will undergo additional military training.”
“He also said no students will get mobilized.”
“By law some two million Russians are kept listed as being qualified to serve as reservists. Those are people who had served in the military in the previously; several years, most of them, excluding officers and specialists, between six to eight years ago in theory.”
“Even 300 000 might be quite hard for Russia to pull off quickly.”
No refresher training for the vast majority.
“The social and political climate in Russia is such that many reservists will likely try to dodge service. Russian law was amended alongside the mobilization calling for greater prison sentences for such and similar transgressions. The fact the new law included the provision for prison sentences for voluntary surrenders may already mean even the Russian government expects some people will try to surrender outright to the enemy.” Hard to see how expecting reservists to fight to the death for Vlad’s Big Adventure will increase morale.
300,000 is the number of reservists who left in the last two years.
If almost all of those new reserves are to serve in the land forces, with the Army being a third of the overall military, it might mean people called upon will mostly be five years past their military service. [Defense Minister] Shoigu further said mobilization will also be limited to those with combat experience. All the Russian troops rotated in Syria since 2014 are unlikely to reach that figure, but there are veterans of operations in Ukraine 2014 of Georgia in 2008 and the wars in Chechnya. Those may indeed yield a force over 300 000, but it also may mean that some of those mobilized reservists will have not seen military training for 15 or more years.
Veterans of the Georgian war (which Russia won handily) probably won’t be a problem, but I doubt the others were such happy affairs that veterans of those campaigns will be eager to repeat the experience against the far better-armed and better-trained Ukrainians.
“In 2019, Russia had perhaps 5,000 reservists receive refresher training. A new push was done in 2021 with plans of 38,000 troops adjusting the Southern military District. But allegedly only 10% of the called upon men actually enlisted in the reserves.”
Conscripts can’t be sent outside of Russia, but surprise! When Russia announces that their sham referendum passed, that means they can be sent to Ukraine then.
“Seven months ago, such mobilization might have been more effective. But as Ukraine has a seven month lead in mobilization and training of reservists, it’s not likely Russia will be able to stop Ukrainian counter-offensives right away.”
Judging from how well Russia has previously run this war, expect badly equipped and under-trained reservists to be thrown piecemeal into the battle lines to be slaughtered.
This isn’t the Red Army of the latter part of the Great Patriotic War. Recall that the capitalist USA provided thousands of Studebaker 2.5-ton trucks to perform logistics tasks and pull wheeled artillery. U.S Sherman and British Valentine tanks also supplemented the ubiquitous T-34. British Spitfire and American P-39 fighter planes served in the Red Air Force. The Reds may have engaged 80% of the German Army, but British Bully Beef, American Spam and New England boots kept the Red Army in the fight.
All those stored T-55 and T-62 MBT’s haven’t been maintained and are only good for target duty. Not too impressed with North Korean artillery shells and Iranian drones.
Difficult to believe they will be ready before Ukraine has pushed the Russians out of everywhere bar maybe Crimea. I guess if you flood Crimea with 300K of reservists it could make it hard to liberate?
“I guess if you flood Crimea with 300K of reservists it could make it hard to liberate?”
Considering most of the Crimea’s water comes from the Ukraine, the more soldiers the Russian put there the easier it becomes to push them out by denying water. Denying water is going to work a whole lot faster than denying food.
Like I was saying yesterday, this is probably going to turn into another iteration of the 1981 attempt at mobilization that had thousands of called-up reservists wandering the forests committing drunken crimes on the locals. It was so bad that the guys running the whole mess just stopped the attempted mobilization and swept the whole mess under the carpet.
I spoke with a participant in that cluster-f*ck, back in the 1990s. He described what went on, and it was a fascinating insight into the state of the Soviet armed forces during that era. At the same time, Afghanistan was going on, and that demonstrated even more dysfunction. Nearly every single Soviet soldier that went to Afghanistan wound up contracting diseases like typhus, dysentery, and a whole host of other things that most Western armies managed to prevent through field sanitation discipline that the Soviets couldn’t quite manage to pull off. If you examine the difference between the American experience in Afghanistan compared to the Soviet one…? Dear God, the horror.
I don’t think this is going to end well for Russia. I expect that there are going to be horror stories about called-up conscripts not being fed, not being clothed, and then just going AWOL out into the surrounding communities to “forage” for themselves, with the likely consequences for the locals. It’ll be a mess, and I suspect that we’re going to see revolutionary conditions here in a few months. Although, I wouldn’t dare predict what level of stupidity that might ensue–I never expected Putin to keep doubling-down on the stupid the way he is, or that the surrounding matrix of Russian oligarchs would put up with this level of idiocy.
Next year or two is going to be… Interesting. No telling where it goes, or how it ends; I suspect that this is going to turn into another “Fall of the Tsar” sequence, one that is going to look crystalline-clear once we’re seeing it in the rear-view mirror.
Ideally, these recalled reservists are to relieve the troops that’s been on the line for over 6 months. This is something you’re supposed to do on a regular basis to ensure that the troops don’t get burn out. I don’t have faith in Russian troop management that they’ll be used in this way.
Given the comments above about logistics, unfed, unclothed Russian conscripts, here’s a crazy idea:
What about the U.S. and the allies spending serious money on the sorts of things our governments all do after earthquakes and hurricanes and such?
Set up some refugee camps in the interior of Ukraine just for the hungry, ill-clothed, unhappy Russian soldiers? Yes, I know, they’d officially be POW camps, but it seems like it would be most of the same gear.
Would there need to be any secret about this? Wouldn’t it be better to broadcast this far and wide? Lots of red crosses all over the tops of the tents or structures? Lots of pictures and videos showing how the guests are treated?
Who knows but that amidst the problematic recruits, some number of these folks might make good candidates for naturalization into a rebuilding Ukraine. They would have trouble going back to Russia, right? Wouldn’t it be in Ukraine’s interest to roll out the red carpet for all new arrivals who don’t want to be there? Same for exhausted Russian troops already in-theater, excepting those who may merit punishment for war crimes.
If US “troop management” was a sh*t-show from WWII forward, the Soviets and their Russian successors were and are an ever-expanding series of cesspools.
The Russian vatniks in Ukraine are not going to be “relieved” or “reinforced”. That is not the Russian way of war. Instead, they’re going to be written off, and newly formed replacement units are going to be pumped in to combat. Thing is, they won’t have the nice new equipment to use, and likely won’t even be trained on what they do get handed, coming out of the stripped-bare depots that have been used by corruptocrats to fuel their yacht funds.
Used to work with a young man who was a former Soviet-era soldier. His description of his experiences serving in what was supposedly an elite “Guards” motorized rifle regiment were… Well, shall we say “Illuminating”?
The Soviets were never, ever going to pull off all the things they imagined they were, with their armed forces. Our own intel people were complicit in painting them as ten-foot giants, mostly to ensure we kept our forces up to par, but… Man, what a f*cking mess the Soviet military was. The amount of sheer abuse the soldiers underwent at the hands of their peers was mind-boggling; in the old days, on the two-year commitment they had? The only way to get new uniforms after you’d done a year or so was to rob the latest incoming class of recruits. Which they did, with great enthusiasm. So, you’d show up, bright and shiny-new, and the first thing that would happen to you at the hands of your more “senior” peers? They’d strip you for your clothes, give you their worn-out castoffs, and if you were really unlucky, rape you.
Not a recipe for unit cohesion. My informant told me that he guessed that if they’d been taken into combat and issued live ammunition, rather more of it would have been fired at the abusers, and there would have been a strong probability of intra-ethnic strife taking precedence over fighting the enemy. The Baltics hated the Russians; the Russians hated the Ukrainians, and they all loathed the Georgians and Armenians. Supposedly, everything was supposed to be a mixed ethnic deal so as to result in ethnic harmony, but what wound up happening is that exposure to the other ethnicities resulted in some serious resentments coming out.
I am pretty certain that this mobilization isn’t going to end the way Putin imagines it will.
There’s a fair amount of evidence that non-Russian ethnics are getting mobilized with absolutely no regard to who is or is not supposed to be called up; they’re just sweeping up everybody and loading them on buses.
@Kirk
“I suspect that this is going to turn into another “Fall of the Tsar” sequence, one that is going to look crystalline-clear once we’re seeing it in the rear-view mirror.”
It’s been crystal-clear since late March. The trends have been consistently in the same direction since then, with no interruption.
The best chance to stop this was at the time of the retreat from Kiev. At that point Putin could have said “Hey, Ukraine, I’m thinking to pull everybody back to the Feb 23 line and make some noises about how my objectives have all been met by the completely empty verbiage you’re about to spout. Sound good? Help me out, please, I’ve learned my lesson.” Zelensky might’ve gone for it.
Vlad being Vlad, that didn’t happen. He just keeps doubling down on a losing hand.
Maybe The Gaffer can explain, in little bitty words everyone can understand, just why it is he thinks that Russia gets to dictate to Ukraine what Ukraine does? Did the papers they signed back at the end of the Soviet Union, with the guarantees if Ukraine gave up their share of the Soviet nukes mean nothing?
The US State Department is abysmally incompetent. Casting them or any of the other Obama-appointed idiots as these Machiavellian geniuses is a sad joke. Their ineffectual work against Orban and Netanyahu, plus all the demonstrated incompetence elsewhere make it pretty plain that even if the American Ambassador was somehow involved in the Ukrainian situation, her work was almost certainly useless. The State Department is mostly staffed by utter f*cking morons who know nothing, which is precisely what they demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, earlier on, in the former Yugoslavia, which is one reason it is the “former Yugoslavia”.
Frankly, if I were Putin and as smart as he thinks he is, I’d have been encouraging US State Department involvement in Ukraine. I honestly can’t think of a more effective way to destroy a country than to have that “help” for it.
Bottom line is this: The Russians are assholes. Always have been, likely always will be. Their conduct in this war alone condemns them, and highlights exactly why their neighbors all think they need to be in an anti-Russian alliance against them–For their own protection. Everything from how they treat their soldiers to what targets they choose inside Ukraine, to all the propaganda they spew just indicates what assholes they really are. The Russians have been perpetrating a fraud since the time of the Tsars, and their primary victims have always been other supposed “citizens of the Empire” whether it was the Tsar or the Soviets. The main reason for the Holodomor was that Stalin needed the foreign exchange to pay for industrialization, and the early American “true believers” in Communism happily took that wheat and other agricultural products in return for building industrial plants across the Soviet Union. The Azovstal complex was built by Americans for the Soviets on the backs of millions of dead Ukrainian kulaks, so for us to now say “Yeah, you lot belong under the Russians…” is just a little bit wrong.
Russian conduct in this war makes it plain that even if they were in the right, then they should lose anyway. Ethnic cleansing, “filtration camps”, interrogation centers and mass graves tell me that, and if you think those aren’t real…? Maybe you ought to go see for yourself, and tell the families of those dead Ukrainians that they’re part of a fraud.
Russia is a cancer on the face of Eurasia. That’s what it was under the Tsar, and it still is. Last nation to free its serfs, ferf*cksake–In the 19th Century. Does that tell you anything about their mentality?
This isn’t the Red Army of the latter part of the Great Patriotic War. Recall that the capitalist USA provided thousands of Studebaker 2.5-ton trucks to perform logistics tasks and pull wheeled artillery. U.S Sherman and British Valentine tanks also supplemented the ubiquitous T-34. British Spitfire and American P-39 fighter planes served in the Red Air Force. The Reds may have engaged 80% of the German Army, but British Bully Beef, American Spam and New England boots kept the Red Army in the fight.
All those stored T-55 and T-62 MBT’s haven’t been maintained and are only good for target duty. Not too impressed with North Korean artillery shells and Iranian drones.
This will not end well for Big Red.
Difficult to believe they will be ready before Ukraine has pushed the Russians out of everywhere bar maybe Crimea. I guess if you flood Crimea with 300K of reservists it could make it hard to liberate?
“I guess if you flood Crimea with 300K of reservists it could make it hard to liberate?”
Considering most of the Crimea’s water comes from the Ukraine, the more soldiers the Russian put there the easier it becomes to push them out by denying water. Denying water is going to work a whole lot faster than denying food.
Like I was saying yesterday, this is probably going to turn into another iteration of the 1981 attempt at mobilization that had thousands of called-up reservists wandering the forests committing drunken crimes on the locals. It was so bad that the guys running the whole mess just stopped the attempted mobilization and swept the whole mess under the carpet.
I spoke with a participant in that cluster-f*ck, back in the 1990s. He described what went on, and it was a fascinating insight into the state of the Soviet armed forces during that era. At the same time, Afghanistan was going on, and that demonstrated even more dysfunction. Nearly every single Soviet soldier that went to Afghanistan wound up contracting diseases like typhus, dysentery, and a whole host of other things that most Western armies managed to prevent through field sanitation discipline that the Soviets couldn’t quite manage to pull off. If you examine the difference between the American experience in Afghanistan compared to the Soviet one…? Dear God, the horror.
I don’t think this is going to end well for Russia. I expect that there are going to be horror stories about called-up conscripts not being fed, not being clothed, and then just going AWOL out into the surrounding communities to “forage” for themselves, with the likely consequences for the locals. It’ll be a mess, and I suspect that we’re going to see revolutionary conditions here in a few months. Although, I wouldn’t dare predict what level of stupidity that might ensue–I never expected Putin to keep doubling-down on the stupid the way he is, or that the surrounding matrix of Russian oligarchs would put up with this level of idiocy.
Next year or two is going to be… Interesting. No telling where it goes, or how it ends; I suspect that this is going to turn into another “Fall of the Tsar” sequence, one that is going to look crystalline-clear once we’re seeing it in the rear-view mirror.
Ideally, these recalled reservists are to relieve the troops that’s been on the line for over 6 months. This is something you’re supposed to do on a regular basis to ensure that the troops don’t get burn out. I don’t have faith in Russian troop management that they’ll be used in this way.
Read a lot here, thanks; don’t comment…
Given the comments above about logistics, unfed, unclothed Russian conscripts, here’s a crazy idea:
What about the U.S. and the allies spending serious money on the sorts of things our governments all do after earthquakes and hurricanes and such?
Set up some refugee camps in the interior of Ukraine just for the hungry, ill-clothed, unhappy Russian soldiers? Yes, I know, they’d officially be POW camps, but it seems like it would be most of the same gear.
Would there need to be any secret about this? Wouldn’t it be better to broadcast this far and wide? Lots of red crosses all over the tops of the tents or structures? Lots of pictures and videos showing how the guests are treated?
Who knows but that amidst the problematic recruits, some number of these folks might make good candidates for naturalization into a rebuilding Ukraine. They would have trouble going back to Russia, right? Wouldn’t it be in Ukraine’s interest to roll out the red carpet for all new arrivals who don’t want to be there? Same for exhausted Russian troops already in-theater, excepting those who may merit punishment for war crimes.
If US “troop management” was a sh*t-show from WWII forward, the Soviets and their Russian successors were and are an ever-expanding series of cesspools.
The Russian vatniks in Ukraine are not going to be “relieved” or “reinforced”. That is not the Russian way of war. Instead, they’re going to be written off, and newly formed replacement units are going to be pumped in to combat. Thing is, they won’t have the nice new equipment to use, and likely won’t even be trained on what they do get handed, coming out of the stripped-bare depots that have been used by corruptocrats to fuel their yacht funds.
Used to work with a young man who was a former Soviet-era soldier. His description of his experiences serving in what was supposedly an elite “Guards” motorized rifle regiment were… Well, shall we say “Illuminating”?
The Soviets were never, ever going to pull off all the things they imagined they were, with their armed forces. Our own intel people were complicit in painting them as ten-foot giants, mostly to ensure we kept our forces up to par, but… Man, what a f*cking mess the Soviet military was. The amount of sheer abuse the soldiers underwent at the hands of their peers was mind-boggling; in the old days, on the two-year commitment they had? The only way to get new uniforms after you’d done a year or so was to rob the latest incoming class of recruits. Which they did, with great enthusiasm. So, you’d show up, bright and shiny-new, and the first thing that would happen to you at the hands of your more “senior” peers? They’d strip you for your clothes, give you their worn-out castoffs, and if you were really unlucky, rape you.
Not a recipe for unit cohesion. My informant told me that he guessed that if they’d been taken into combat and issued live ammunition, rather more of it would have been fired at the abusers, and there would have been a strong probability of intra-ethnic strife taking precedence over fighting the enemy. The Baltics hated the Russians; the Russians hated the Ukrainians, and they all loathed the Georgians and Armenians. Supposedly, everything was supposed to be a mixed ethnic deal so as to result in ethnic harmony, but what wound up happening is that exposure to the other ethnicities resulted in some serious resentments coming out.
I am pretty certain that this mobilization isn’t going to end the way Putin imagines it will.
There’s a fair amount of evidence that non-Russian ethnics are getting mobilized with absolutely no regard to who is or is not supposed to be called up; they’re just sweeping up everybody and loading them on buses.
@Kirk
“I suspect that this is going to turn into another “Fall of the Tsar” sequence, one that is going to look crystalline-clear once we’re seeing it in the rear-view mirror.”
It’s been crystal-clear since late March. The trends have been consistently in the same direction since then, with no interruption.
The best chance to stop this was at the time of the retreat from Kiev. At that point Putin could have said “Hey, Ukraine, I’m thinking to pull everybody back to the Feb 23 line and make some noises about how my objectives have all been met by the completely empty verbiage you’re about to spout. Sound good? Help me out, please, I’ve learned my lesson.” Zelensky might’ve gone for it.
Vlad being Vlad, that didn’t happen. He just keeps doubling down on a losing hand.
Call me decidedly pessimistic.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ex-cia-ray-mcgovern-conditioned-war-russia
And.
https://nexttobagend.blogspot.com/2022/09/thinking-unthinkable-again.html
Maybe The Gaffer can explain, in little bitty words everyone can understand, just why it is he thinks that Russia gets to dictate to Ukraine what Ukraine does? Did the papers they signed back at the end of the Soviet Union, with the guarantees if Ukraine gave up their share of the Soviet nukes mean nothing?
The US State Department is abysmally incompetent. Casting them or any of the other Obama-appointed idiots as these Machiavellian geniuses is a sad joke. Their ineffectual work against Orban and Netanyahu, plus all the demonstrated incompetence elsewhere make it pretty plain that even if the American Ambassador was somehow involved in the Ukrainian situation, her work was almost certainly useless. The State Department is mostly staffed by utter f*cking morons who know nothing, which is precisely what they demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, earlier on, in the former Yugoslavia, which is one reason it is the “former Yugoslavia”.
Frankly, if I were Putin and as smart as he thinks he is, I’d have been encouraging US State Department involvement in Ukraine. I honestly can’t think of a more effective way to destroy a country than to have that “help” for it.
Bottom line is this: The Russians are assholes. Always have been, likely always will be. Their conduct in this war alone condemns them, and highlights exactly why their neighbors all think they need to be in an anti-Russian alliance against them–For their own protection. Everything from how they treat their soldiers to what targets they choose inside Ukraine, to all the propaganda they spew just indicates what assholes they really are. The Russians have been perpetrating a fraud since the time of the Tsars, and their primary victims have always been other supposed “citizens of the Empire” whether it was the Tsar or the Soviets. The main reason for the Holodomor was that Stalin needed the foreign exchange to pay for industrialization, and the early American “true believers” in Communism happily took that wheat and other agricultural products in return for building industrial plants across the Soviet Union. The Azovstal complex was built by Americans for the Soviets on the backs of millions of dead Ukrainian kulaks, so for us to now say “Yeah, you lot belong under the Russians…” is just a little bit wrong.
Russian conduct in this war makes it plain that even if they were in the right, then they should lose anyway. Ethnic cleansing, “filtration camps”, interrogation centers and mass graves tell me that, and if you think those aren’t real…? Maybe you ought to go see for yourself, and tell the families of those dead Ukrainians that they’re part of a fraud.
Russia is a cancer on the face of Eurasia. That’s what it was under the Tsar, and it still is. Last nation to free its serfs, ferf*cksake–In the 19th Century. Does that tell you anything about their mentality?
@kirk. Thank you for putting it all together.