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?
The Russians have a social contract, the Kremlin Oligarchs are free to do as they please; in return the peasents (at least the Ethnic Russian ones anyways.) Do not get mass conscripted.
Putin probably (if this report is accurate.) Hoping to use the election as a signal of the Peasants consent toarch to the front line, how he will determine that hard to say.
Mobilisation rates have been and will continue to be very low in Moscow region and to a lesser extent St Petersburg whilst massively impacting “peripheral” minority cultures that the Russian state finds “inconvenient”.
Probably, it’s just my understanding is Russia is running out of minorities to toss in the grinder.
Well the only parties allowed to run are pro war so any result shows a pro war position for the population.
He also now needs to pull from Moscow and St Petersburg, which is politically dicey so it isnt as simple as he gets to do whatever - the people in those cities have sway and their support matters. If you pull 100,000 kids to the frontlines there could be a few dozen playmakers that get impacted and all of a sudden there is a move to replace the poot.
One of their top economists said as much last week, lenin wrote in December he would not live to see the revolution as it was only building and would take decades. It happened the following February.
True only pro war parties are in the election running but folks could try to boycott the vote (emphasis on the try, I am not blind to the state using means to coerce people to vote of not fake the turn out numbers)
Yes hence this report about waiting for the election. If there is a ground swell of people going out to vote in favor of the war it would signal to the Kremlin a willingness to go to the front. Lot easier to conscript the middle and upper classes when they join of their own opinion.