The Three Escalations - Part II
How Russia's Decision to Expand the Ukraine War and Mobilize its Population Doubles Down on the Conflict
The announced mobilization of 300,000 additional Russian conscripts marks the most significant Russia move in their war since the decision to retreat from the Kyiv front and pursue escalation in Donbas. Since that adjustment on the front lines, Russia has struggled to make headway either on the battlefield or within geopolitical circles. The stunning ability of Ukraine to stabilize the invasion fronts, gain scores political and social victories, re-equip and re-train its army into a de facto NATO quality force and push Russian forces out of the Kharkiv area while retaking Izyum also marks a stunning defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This puts Putin in a corner as well (a corner of his own making it should be noted). Throwing his arsenal at Ukraine is failing. His geopolitical position is so bad that historians and military analysts are conducting a reexamination of just how potent the military prowess of the Soviet Union truly was for all those years. His internal political position can be summed up by the roughly twenty officials who have remarkably fallen out of windows late this summer.
This leaves few options. The nuclear card must be played last which, despite recent nuclear sabre-rattling, Moscow does still seem to understand. This leaves throwing the Russian population at Ukraine as one of his remaining plays.
Can it work?
It must be stated that throwing bodies at the problem has worked for Russia in the past. By all accounts, the French and German armies were the better pure militaries at the start of their wars with Russia/USSR. Napoleon and Hitler both scored several victories over Russia before eventually succumbing to Russian counterattacks. This is at least the popular narrative. In reality there were many more factors than simply “fighting a larger population” that led to their ultimate defeats. Regardless, Russia is not being invaded in this scenario, there are not multiple fronts at play, and warfare in 2022 is far different from 1812 and 1941.
Already Putin’s mobilization is a stark loser in the soft war taking place on social media. Viral videos show students being seized from classrooms or officers telling conscripts they have no supplies and that they should write their mothers to send tampons and pads to plug bullet wounds.
Rusty weapons, WWII-era steel helmets, arson attacks on recruiting centers, videos from Ukraine of soldiers that immediately surrendered claiming they are receiving no training…this is not an army. The patriotic glories of moving whole factories beyond the Ural Mountains in a matter of days or a volunteer going to the front unequipped to pick up a fallen comrade’s weapon are just that…high minded nonsense. Before the mobilization has even started, Putin has lost the morale aspect of this move.
Warfare in 2022 is not throwing bodies, bullets and mass produced tanks at your enemy until you grind them back. Warfare is now a viral, social, precision and technical monster. Even a million Russians equipped with WWII era equipment do not answer for things like lack of air superiority, the inability to respond to modern artillery barrages, 80’s-era communications, lack of supplies, poor to nonexistent tactics that allow whole tank columns to be picked off by a handful of Ukrainians with javelins. All Putin has done is trade a generation of Russian young men for time.
Even if Russian losses never approach the horrors of the two world wars the generation involved will be changed. By many estimates the “300,000 reserves” number is a lie and videos like those above confirm that Russian military and police officers are picking young men out of classrooms and off the streets. Significant portions of minority states, especially in the Russian east, are among the draftees. Does Putin not think this will have an impact on the economy? On socio-political movements on federal states that are not ethnically Russian? This is a mass manpower drain on a country that is already on shaky footing. By throwing these soldiers into the fire in a strategically wasteful manner he is actually hurting the one thing he has over Ukraine, a country largely untouched by the war.
Which brings up the last potential consequence of this maneuver, the cracks on the home front. Russian propaganda has largely quarantined the true nature and scope of the war from the Russian people but at this point the bottom has fallen out. 98,000 Russians don’t flee into Kazakhstan over the weekend because they think they are winning a righteous war. They fled because they know Ukraine is a bloodbath, their leaders are incompetent, and they want no part of the situation. The economic fallout from so many men leaving overnight will be enormous.
Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev of the Moscow-based Center for Research on Post-Industrial Studies recently told The Insider that he “agreed with predictions that Russia’s GDP would drop around 4–5 percent this year.” But now he believes that Russia’s GDP will drop that much in October alone, and the “next months will only consolidate the trend. Now my spring forecast for a 10% fall seems almost too optimistic,” he said.
“The Russian economy is going to die by winter, I wrote in early March. Now I think I was right. The mobilization announced on Sept. 21 was a milestone that really divided Russian history into ‘before’ and ‘after’—an event that began the final countdown of Putin’s era.”
Protests have already broken out across Russia along with attacks on recruitment centers. The same factors that make war different in 2022 from 1812 also make conducting a revolution different than in the past. Frankly, Russia has a long history of abusing its population and its population taking it on the chin. The one successful revolution in Russian history came with the backing of a country that was also at war with the Tsar.
The idea that enough economic pain and enough dead Russian soldiers will magically cause the Russian people to storm the Kremlin and overthrow Putin is wishful thinking at best.
That those same revolutionaries would reconstitute Russia as a liberal functioning democracy respectful of international law and the rights of former parts of the empire may be even more ludicrous.
But the cracks are there and just as Russia sabre-rattles that it will spread the pain of its conflict to Europe, the reality is the consequences of its own actions are spreading at home.
Here is Part I which discusses the escalation with the sabotage of NordStream. Part III tomorrow will cover the annexations and false referenda in Russian-occupied Ukraine.