Something doesn’t smell right about this alleged post-election mobilitzation in Russia.
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It’s Russia. The election’s "results’ have as much impact to Putin’s crime syndicate as shooting rubber bands at the stars. Why would they bother to wait for a false mandate in an election that doesn’t matter?
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They need the troops now. Mobilization that doesn’t start until October means those currently-civilian conscripts will not even start reaching the front lines for somewhere between 8 weeks and 6 months.
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The Russian war strategy has 3 aspects:
- Small infiltration teams pushed into soft areas to probe defenses and hope Ukraine leaves. This uses men as worthless meat.
- Standoff missile and glide bomb terror attacks to soften Ukrainian defenses and destroy society. This uses high cost, high input and hard to replace assets.
- Keep doing both until they give you something to make it stop. Then prepare for the next invasion before Ukraine can recover strength.
A mobilization of say 500k civilians won’t have a lick of difference to the tech heavy terror bombing campaign. It will only help perpetuate the meat grinder, but with civlians less capable than the current grunts being blasted into pulp in muddy rainwater puddles today.
All this to say - The Mobilization feels like a bit of a bluff. Something to scare Ukraine into concessions.
And even if it’s not, it just gives enough meat to keep the currently failing strategy and death machine griding for a few more months.
Annnnd - It presents new and clear danger to the home front.
Doesn’t mean the Kremlin isn’t going to do it. They are way beyond the point of madness and hubris. But it won’t work and it would serve other purposes than simply “winning” the war.
What do you think?
All fair, but your thoughts please on this:
RE: 1 - Time is worth more than fake legitimacy. And troops need some ramp up time, even with barest minimal training, it takes time logistically to outfit and transport even the greenest conscripts. If you need troops today, they needed to enter the pipeline 6 months ago. Waiting for a sham election to legitimize troops you need today doesn’t make any sense, even in Russian thinking.
RE: 2 - The ‘current pace’ is quagmire. Russian territorial gains are near or below net zero at this point, and the next waves of men will have less equipment and hardware support than the last ones did. Capability matters as much as raw numbers do. What even is a theory of victory at this point?
RE: 3 - Infiltration - understood that it looks like progress in a war where not much else is going well for you. But it’s also not compatible with their war aims. The purpose of this war is conquest - and infiltration might work to probe defenses against an enemy that a) can fall back and b) gives a damn about the lives of it’s men. But infiltration is not a good strategy for occupation.
Just look at the american experience in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. Fine - if you can push your forces into territory, great. But if the other side doesn’t stop killing them with drones, snipers, counter assaults, IED’s and assassinations, then you can’t pacfiy that territory and can’t get any gains from it. Eventually, you have to leave. The only tactic Russia seems able to execute isn’t compatible with their strategic war aims - which is conquest of territory and regime change. If Ukraine keeps killing every russian within 30km of the front, there’s not much point to holding the ground.
There’s a lot of whinging nay-sayers who say Ukraine is “losing” becuase they don’t realistically have the means to push the Russians out of Crimea and the Donbas. This badly misses the point of ukraine’s strategy. They aren’t trying to push the russians out. They’re trying to make staying impossible.
I don’t think the average Russian is a mindless tank mine runner. They may not value life, even their own. But the ones who have managed to stay out of the war so far are not likely to be quickly turned into idelogical missiles who will bum rush a defensive position with a brick of C4 up their ass to clear the way for the Blyatniks behind them.
I think all Putin is doing is buying time, and that the #1 thing he worries about today isn’t winning the war - it’s in spotting a coup at home before it happens.
I think this is heavily under-stated. As long as russia is taking huge casualties without making significant progress, Ukraine is winning. All of occupied Ukraine (and more) is within striking range, so unless russia can completely neuter Ukraines ability to strike occupied territories (which is looking more unlikely by the day), it’s simply limited how long they can hold it. You can’t realistically annex a place as long as sticking your nose out of the bunker can get you killed.
Thank you. The real pivot of this war is that Russia simply cannot stop Ukraine from making and deploying drones. Nobody has any counter for them.
Russia is dependent on pushing men into places they don’t belong and then calling that land theirs. You know - a policy of Infestation. But, like garden pests, Ukraine will get them all eventually, as long as they can continue to deploy drones - which seems to be a lot more infinite than Russia’s ability to push fresh meat into the grinder.
The territory isn’t worth very much if it is nothing more than a drone killzone. Pretty hard to occupy, settle and generate economic activity when you’re under constant, personalized bombardment.
The most realistic de-escalation is not a ceasefire per se, but probably a joint exclusion zone larger than the practical operating space of fiber optic drones. Like, 100km or more buffer zone. This isn’t a new concept - when the Romans were expanding, they would create a large de-populated dead zone between their boundaries and that of the neighbors. Anyone and anything caught in the zone was killed - the thinking being that they could avoid a large army build up to invade their borders if the real, habitable border was many, many miles back from yours.
An exclusion zone like this is a major loss for Russia. They are fighting a war of territorial conquest, and retreating back to where they were is the same as a major strategic defeat. But the alternative is to keep bleeding and expending resources to gain less and less uncontrollable Ukrainian land. They don’t have any good choices left. The smart thing for Russia to have done, other than stay home in the first place, would have been in 2023 to fall back to Luhansk and their portion of Donetsk and keep Crimea logistically intact. But - they’re stupid and greedy, so…here we are.