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Ukraine Invasion Day 215: Russia's continuing HR problems with its military press-ganging [1]
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Date: 2022-09-25
Mobilization will likely do more harm in Russia than a defeat of Ukraine. More grinding will happen as the substandard recruits may not make much of a difference in the longer run of the invasion. Some estimates have 250,000 potential conscripts fleeing so far. Russian airlines staff start to receive conscription notices.
The rashist defensive line has collapsed at the Donetsk-Kharkiv region boundary and at one, possibly two, points along the Oskil River. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are advancing rapidly on Svatove to begin in earnest the liberation of the north of Luhansk region. pic.twitter.com/jwXoFqPco3
Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to overcome fundamental structural challenges in attempting to mobilize large numbers of Russians to continue his war in Ukraine. The “partial mobilization” he ordered on September 21 will generate additional forces but inefficiently and with high domestic social and political costs. The forces generated by this “partial mobilization,” critically, are very unlikely to add substantially to the Russian military’s net combat power in 2022. Putin will have to fix basic flaws in the Russian military personnel and equipment systems if mobilization is to have any significant impact even in the longer term. His actions thus far suggest that he is far more concerned with rushing bodies to the battlefield than with addressing these fundamental flaws.
This is where your support for imprisoned Russian activist Alexei Navalny may end: "He also said that when he becomes president of the Russian Federation, he will not return the semi-island to Kyiv: "Crimea is what, a sandwich with sausage to be returned here and there?", - Navalny asked."
Russia will mobilize reservists for this conflict. The process will be ugly, the quality of the reservists poor, and their motivation to fight likely even worse. But the systems are sufficiently in place to allow military commissars and other Russian officials to find people and send them to training units and thence to war. But the low quality of the voluntary reserve units produced by the BARS and volunteer battalion efforts is likely a reliable indicator of the net increase in combat power Russia can expect to generate in this way. This mobilization will not affect the course of the conflict in 2022 and may not have a very dramatic impact on Russia’s ability to sustain its current level of effort into 2023. The problems undermining Putin’s effort to mobilize his people to fight, finally, are so deep and fundamental that he cannot likely fix them in the coming months—and possibly for years. Putin is likely coming up against the hard limits of Russia’s ability to fight a large-scale war. www.understandingwar.org/...
x CORRECTION. Earlier reports suggesting that Russian conscripts get only one day of training before being sent to front may be incorrect. New report says they get ZERO days.
https://t.co/4MYbImxI0d — Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Ret. (@stavridisj) September 26, 2022
The problems Putin confronts stem in part from long-standing unresolved tensions in the Russian approach to generating military manpower. Russian and Soviet military manpower policies from 1874 through 2008 were designed to support the full mass mobilization of the entire Russian and Soviet populations for full-scale war. Universal conscription and a minimum two-year service obligation was intended to ensure that virtually all military-age males received sufficient training and experience in combat specialties that they could be recalled to active service after serving their terms and rapidly go to war as effective soldiers. Most Russian and Soviet combat units were kept in a “cadre” status in peacetime—they retained a nearly full complement of officers and many non-commissioned officers, along with a small number of soldiers. Russian and Soviet doctrine and strategy required large-scale reserve mobilization to fill out these cadre units in wartime. This cadre-and-reserve approach to military manpower was common among continental European powers from the end of the 19th century through the Cold War.
The reduction in the mandatory term of service for conscripts made Russia’s reserves less combat ready. Conscripts normally reach a bare minimum of military competence within a year—the lost second year is the period in which a cadre-and-reserve military would normally bring its conscripts to a meaningful level of combat capability. The shift to a one-year term of mandatory military service in 2008 means that the last classes of Russian men who served two-year terms are now in their early 30s. Younger men in the prime age brackets for being recalled to fight served only the abbreviated one-year period.
The prioritization of building a professional force and the de-prioritization of conscript service likely translated into an erosion of the bureaucratic structures required for mobilization. Mobilization is always a bureaucratically challenging undertaking. It requires local officials throughout the entire country to perform well a task they may never conduct and rehearse rarely, if at all. Maintaining the bureaucratic infrastructure required to conduct a large-scale reserve call-up requires considerable attention from senior leadership—attention it likely did not receive in Russia over the last 15 years or so.
Putin has already conducted at least four attempts at mobilization in the last year, likely draining the pool of available combat-ready (and willing) reservists ahead of the “partial mobilization.”
www.understandingwar.org/...
x «We are not blind! Russia attacked Ukraine. Russia is on foreign soil. No to war!” Dagestan women protest Putin’s criminal mobilization. We thank them for their bravery and urge others to join. Do not let Putin pay for his failed military adventures with lives of your close ones. pic.twitter.com/B1Q63SYbGV — Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) September 25, 2022
x The relaxation for the russians is over: from Monday, Georgia plans to close the borders with russia for men, - said the member of the Georgian Parliament Nona Mamulashvili. pic.twitter.com/lTIZqTAt53 — 🇺🇦War in Ukraine🇺🇦 (@Rinegati) September 25, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine — In the occupied city of Kherson, some Ukrainian men believe that if they break their own arms, maybe the Russians will not force them into military service. Others are hiding in basements. Some are trying to run even though they are forbidden to leave the city, residents said, and virtually everyone is afraid. “People are panicking,” said Katerina, 30. “First they were searching our houses, and now the Russians will conscript our men to their army. This is all unlawful but very real for us.” As the Kremlin’s conscription drive faced protests across Russia for a fifth day, new signs of resistance, and fear, emerged on Sunday in the territories it occupies in Ukraine as well.
The drive to compel Ukrainians to battle other Ukrainians is part of a broader, if risky, effort by Moscow to mobilize hundreds of thousands of new fighters as its forces suffer huge casualties and struggle to hold off Ukrainian advances in the east and south.
It comes at the same time as a Russian-orchestrated vote that is setting the stage for the Kremlin to cleave Ukraine through an annexation that has been broadly condemned around the world. The result of the pseudoreferendum underway is expected to be announced on Tuesday. The anticipated outcome: that a majority of people in four Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizka — “voted” to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is then widely expected to declare in coming days those areas belong to Russia and therefore protected by the might of its full arsenal, including the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
x "The Iron Harvest"
How Ukraine has benefited from Russian equipment losses.
https://t.co/fOFUKQiwtW#auspol — Craig Thomler (@craigthomler) September 26, 2022
x After sham referendums are held in occupied territories, negotiations with Russian President will become impossible - Zelenskyy
"I think it's a very dangerous signal from President Putin, telling us that he's not going to end this war," Zelenskyy said.
https://t.co/X2MVR2iw8q — Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) September 25, 2022
x As Ukraine expands offensive, Russian shelling turns neighborhoods into rubble
https://t.co/KBt8HcvEWK via @WSJ — Vadim Drozdovich (@DrozdovichVadim) September 26, 2022
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[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/25/2124974/-Ukraine-Invasion-Day-215-Russia-s-continuing-HR-problems-with-its-military-press-ganging
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