Russian strongman Vladimir Putin wasn’t kidding when he ordered the mobilization of 300,000 men to feed his meat grinder effort in eastern Ukraine, but the rapid call-up isn’t exactly drafting Russia’s youngest and fittest.
In fact, Putin’s rapid mobilization is exposing even more cracks in a Russian military already battered by more than seven months of unexpectedly heavy fighting.
When I first wrote about the Russia mobilization on Wednesday, it was still an open question whether the new troops would be given serious training and formed up into new units with real cohesion, or just given minimal training and sent to fill gaps on the front line.
Question answered:
Russian draftees being told they will receive two weeks of training, then off to the front. The chaos is going to be unimaginable. https://t.co/vmmEhMvSII
— Neil Hauer (@NeilPHauer) September 23, 2022
Historian Stephen Ambrose noted in Band of Brothers that Eisenhower’s replacement system for soldiers serving in Europe could have been designed by Hitler himself. Totally green replacement troops were sent into veteran combat units right on the front line, damaging unit cohesion and leading to unnecessary casualties.
Russia appears to be repeating Ike’s error — but with older troops given far less training and older weapons.
I joked on Twitter that the clip below looks more like a bowling league leaving for a tournament than it does like a military call-up, but that’s more sardonic than humorous. Guys who haven’t served in 20 or 30 years — and who received minimal training during their 12-month draftee period — probably don’t have much business being sent off to war.
First clips coming out of Russia this morning of draftees saying bye to their families. This from a small town in Yakutsk. Credits @taygainfo pic.twitter.com/tlaVRoDgLT
— Pjotr Sauer (@PjotrSauer) September 22, 2022
It isn’t just the men who are older. I’m seeing more and more videos and photos of T-62 tanks, presumably pulled out of storage.
A new batch of cold-war era T62-M tanks (MY1983) for newly mobilized Russian soldiers is on its way to Ukraine. Photo taken on Sep. 11 in Millerovo, Rostov region (source https://t.co/ANNqBbCCu3). pic.twitter.com/4uKBcdfguP
— Mark Krutov (@kromark) September 21, 2022
The T-62 was introduced in 1961 and was quickly obsolesced by the T-72 just ten years later. It was long out-of-date when the men in the above clip were drafted the first time around as young men. The last T-62 was produced — for export to poorer Soviet clients — nearly 50 years ago.
Putin has leaned hard these last few months on ethnic minorities in the country’s more remote areas to fill out his “volunteer battalions,” and not much has changed with the new mobilization order.
This ISW map from July 22 shows that a disproportionate number of those volunteers came from Russia’s least-populated and least-Russian regions.
#Russian Mobilization & Force Generation Update:
The Kremlin is continuing efforts to form regionally-based volunteer battalions.
Authorities in Russia’s #Tyumen Oblast announced the formation of three volunteer units in Tyumen Oblast on July 22. /1https://t.co/bhkICZ8712 pic.twitter.com/2lAXToL0Si
— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) July 24, 2022
Ethnic Russians haven’t been answering the call, even with promises of comparatively lavish pay and benefits.
That’s why, even now, scenes like this one in Muslim-dominated Chechnya are common:
Things are heating up in #Chechnya where protesters went on the streets, demonstrating against the sending of more Chechen fighters to Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/wrD9uhls9T
— NOËL 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) September 20, 2022
It’s believed that Putin is calling up as few ethnic Russians as possible to avoid stirring up unrest in the better-off segments of the population.
Here’s a scene in largely tribal Dagestan where various Muslim peoples predominate:
DEVELOPING:
Locals used their own vehicles to block the federal highway near Babayurt, Dagestan.
They say this is to stop the mobilization buses from taking their men away.#Dagestan #Russia pic.twitter.com/7vE6DMZiJm
— WhereisRussiaToday (@WhereisRussia) September 22, 2022
Things aren’t any different in Sakha, and if you haven’t heard of it, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s maybe the most remote part of Siberia. Sakha is Russia’s largest region yet contains fewer than one million people. Half of those are Turkic Yakuts.
So if most of the “Russian men” at this Sakha mobilization center don’t look very Russian, that’s why.
Russian men reaching a local commisars office in Yakutia for enlisting following Mobilization in Russia.
pic.twitter.com/NTrqHTmnCn— Russian Market (@runews) September 22, 2022
How much harder Moscow can lean on Russia’s non-Russian minorities — they make up 19% of the population — remains a mystery.
Putin has promised only to call up those who have already served (a promise already broken), although, as previously noted, being a Russian draftee means that training takes a distant third behind brutal hazing and stolen rations.
The strongest element of the Russian mobilization might be the previous crop of 135,000 draftees, who could find themselves in a “stop-loss” situation and sent to the front. Draftees are, by law, only allowed to serve in defense of Russia. But once Putin’s sham referendums give Russia a pretext to annex eastern and southern Ukraine, those draftees could be sent to fight in Ukraine — on an illegal technicality.
That might be 135,000 fairly young new soldiers. It might also be 135,000 angry young men.
“Quantity,” Joseph Stalin is supposed to have said, “has a quality all its own.” And he certainly used Russian quantities to beat the mighty German Wehrmacht. Maybe Russian quantity can win the day once more.
We’ll see.
One last thing.
Learn to sniff out the obvious fakes, like this one I saw making the rounds on Thursday, big-time:
Rifles from 1914? Russia might be short on their more modern armored vehicles and precision munitions, but they aren’t that desperate.
And sure enough, military analyst Rob Lee tweeted: “Seeing this photo get passed around. As you can see, it is from parade rehearsals from two years ago.”
If something seems too good (or too bad) to be true, it probably is.
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