The Looming Double Failure of Putin’s Mobilization

“The same question arose in every soul,” wrote Tolstoy in War and Peace: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed.” Vladimir Putin’s orders for mobilization bring the sentiment from a quotable quote to an existential crisis for Russian men of fighting age. Initial reports are that those questions are answerable in ways that are not going to help Putin dig out from the Ukrainian mess he finds himself in.

BBC:

Widespread demonstrations have broken out since President Vladimir Putin announced plans to draft 300,000 men to fight in Ukraine.

But Mr Putin’s move to draft civilians into the military has sparked large scale protests in urban areas, with more than 1,000 people being detained at demonstrations earlier this week.

In Moscow, news agency AFP reported witnessing one demonstrator shouting “we are not cannon fodder” as she was arrested by officers.

And in St Petersburg, Russia’s second city, one man told reporters: “I don’t want to go to war for Putin.”

Seventy-year-old Natalya Dubova told AFP that she opposed the war and confessed she was “afraid for young people” being ordered to the front.

Some of those arrested on Saturday reported being given their draft papers after being detained. The Kremlin defended the practice earlier this week, saying “it isn’t against the law”.

Moscow has also approved harsh new punishments for those accused of dereliction of duty once drafted.

Mr Putin signed fresh decrees on Saturday imposing punishments of up to 10 years imprisonment for any soldier caught surrendering, attempting to desert the military or refusing to fight.

The president also signed orders granting Russian citizenship to any foreign national who signs up to serve a year in the country’s military.

The decree, which some observers have suggested displays how severe Moscow’s shortage of troops has become, bypasses the usual requirement of five years of residency in the country. Elsewhere, other young Russians continue to flee mobilization by seeking to leave the country.

This mobilization strategy reeks of Putin’s desperation and is going to be a disaster in multiple ways. For Russia, mobilization will make both the military and social/political/propaganda aspects of the Ukrainian war worse, not better.

First off, one of the biggest problems the Russian Army has had in the Ukraine war is logistics. This is not a shock to anyone who has studied the subject, since the Russian army has long neglected to work on, improve, or emphasize their logistical capability. So, aside from the fact those conscripts will be barely trained cannon fodder being rushed to a front where they will be faced with a determined enemy fighting on their home turf, there are serious questions how Putin’s waves of conscripts will even get there at all. And once they get there, the human cost of Putin’s desperate gambit to save face to the debacle he has birthed on Ukraine and Russia will be paid in conscript blood.

Closer to home might be an even bigger problem. Mobilization is going to be a two-edged sword that both gives lie to the propaganda that Putin’s “special operation” was going to be short, decisive, and successful while also blowing up the facade of who was bearing the burden of the fighting and dying. At the outset, the Russians chose their invading combat units carefully, so that the battle not be borne too much by troops from areas like Moscow, a central part of the effort to hide and distort Russian casualty figures. There is no way to hide conscription and shipping off hundreds of thousands to Ukraine and the tens of thousands of dead not returning and the wounded streaming back to Russia.

Somewhere in Putin’s delusional, bunker mentality mind, his fantasized endgame for the conflict was Ukraine not just under Russian control but fully, culturally Russian, unfettered access to the Black Sea, the breadbasket of Eastern Europe back under Moscow’s control, and a new Russian Empire rising. Instead, the paper bear of the Russian military has been exposed, Russia’s proxy states are in conflict with each other, the Russian economy is perilous, and domestic disturbance – the one thing Putin fears the most – is now guaranteed. There is no version of ending Putin’s illegal war of aggression in Ukraine that doesn’t see a weakened, exposed, and humiliated Russia with an embarrassed Putin at its head, a bloody but now determined and emboldened mortal enemy in Ukraine, and a world that has moved to isolate and decouple from the liability of Russian instability.

The conscripts forced onto trains, planes, and buses are not the only ones who will be asking Tolstoy’s “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed,” either in their internal monologue or on a vodka fueled rage on viral video. The oligarchs to whom even Vladimir Putin must answer might start wondering the same thing, if not in mortal terms like the hapless conscripts thrown unprepared to the meat grinder of war, at least to the deep wounds their business and accustomed lifestyle are taking for a goal that is now clearly out of reach. At some point, perhaps they start to look at Tolstoy’s questions, realize the “for what” is themselves, and start to figure the “for whom” of Vladimir Putin might be getting to be more trouble than he is worth.

Endings are always hard to write. Tolstoy famously ended War and Peace with the two-pronged approach of leaving his characters somewhat hanging other than a brief biographical “where are they now” drive by of who hooked up with who, then unleashing a 50-odd page philosophical essay on how historians of his day sucked. Tacking that rant onto an already dense and intense tome is legendary audacity, but hey, it’s his work he can end it how he wants to.

Putin isn’t going to get that option, and increasingly is going to be choosing from a dwindling number of really horrible options. Slinging tens of thousands of unprepared conscripts into battle and rigging snap fake elections reeks of desperation. A murderous dictator who is fearful, embarrassed, and limited in options is a frightful thing, and the only thing for sure is many more will die before the author of this human disaster meets his own end. And that not soon enough.