It was a debate raging in Western newspapers and on Russian state television: would Vladimir Putin declare full mobilisation at his Victory Day speech on Monday?
It was a debate raging in Western newspapers and on Russian state television: would Vladimir Putin declare full mobilisation at his Victory Day speech on Monday?
In the end, he decided against officially declaring the conflict that Moscow currently describes as a “special military operation” a war - something that would have demanded fresh sacrifices of the Russian public.
Many, even in Russia, had been questioning the value of full mobilisation- for that and many other reasons.
Mikhail Khodarenok, a retired lieutenant colonel and editor of the Independent Military Review, an influential Russian military newspaper, tried to pour cold water in a recent appearance on Russian state television.
“Let’s imagine the fanfare as mobilisation is declared,” he said in a televised debate show. “When would we receive the first fighter regiment? By New Year. We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes.”
A tank division would take 90 days, he said. A ship, two years. Sending millions of men armed with outdated Soviet kit that has sat for years in warehouses against a Nato-equipped army – neither militarily nor morally justifiable.
The answer, he said, does not lie in mobilisation as it is traditionally understood.
Mr Khodarenok is a credible military expert. He worked for years in the Russian general staff and, before the invasion, he cautioned against it in an article that correctly predicted the setbacks the Russian army has in fact suffered.
But on this, argued Kirill Mikhailov of Conflict Intelligence Team, a Russian open-source investigation group specialising in military affairs, the retired lieutenant colonel is just wrong.
Ships and aircraft, he said, are not the issue. Manpower is, and only mass mobilisation can fix it.
“The forces currently in Ukraine are badly depleted by recalling conscripts and ‘kontraktniki’ refusing to go,” he said, using the Russian term for professional soldiers. “It is even worse than the actual losses.”
The result is under-manned, exhausted battalions stretched across long sections of front in the face of an increasingly aggressive and well-equipped Ukrainian army.
“The other option is catastrophic defeat in a few months. I doubt they can even hold Kherson without mobilisation, for example. And at some point, the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, and even Crimea, could be in play.”
Losing Crimea and the parts of Donbas seized in 2014 would be a catastrophe for Putin.
The publicity of the debate over mobilisation inside Russia probably reflects real divisions within the ruling elite. Initially, the idea was floated by marginal figures.
Igor Girkin, the former FSB colonel who led the Russian gunmen who started the war in Donbas in 2014, wrote on the Telegram app on April 20 that continuing the war without at least a partial mobilisation would be “both impossible and extremely dangerous”.
He is a bitter critic of the Kremlin and has been banned from state television. He represents a small, imperialist right political force that the Kremlin alternately represses and exploits.
But it is clear that more powerful people were either listening or already thinking along the same lines.
A week later, Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful chairman of the Russian national security council, gave an interview to the government’s official newspaper arguing in favour of full scale, Second World War-style mobilisation.
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s state space agency and a former leader of the far-Right Rodina political party, said on Sunday that victory would be possible only “with full solidarity of the entire country with the army, with the mobilisation of the state economy, with the transfer of the military-industrial complex and related sectors to a military footing”.
Other advisers, especially those responsible for the economy and domestic political policy, will be lobbying Putin to ignore such talk.
Mikhail Mishustin, the Russian prime minister, and Elvira Nabiullina, the technocratic head of the Russian Central Bank, have tried hard to keep the economy on an even keel.
The sudden removal of large numbers of men from the workforce will hardly reward those efforts.
In addition, there is a significant political risk. So far, most of the fighting, and most of the dying, has been done by soldiers from poor, remote regions.
Mobilisation would mean telling the vast majority of the Russian public that they, too, must make sacrifices for the war effort. And it is not clear how they will respond.
But if Putin wants to avoid a defeat, he may not have a choice, says Mr Mikhailov.
“The Ukrainians have proven they can handle operational offensives. See the one around Kharkiv,” he said, referring to the counter-stroke over the past week that has pushed the Russians out of artillery range of that city.
“I don’t believe Russians would collapse rapidly. But it is a losing game in the long run.”
'Full-blown war? We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes' (yahoo.com)
