All the Tsar's men.. Will military mobilization save Putin or his involvement in the Ukraine quagmire?

Translation Introduction:

As news of Russia's setbacks in Ukraine began to leak into the media, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech on September 21 announcing a military mobilization unprecedented since World War II.

While experts argue that the announcement of mobilization in an army the size of the Russian army could turn the military balance upside down, others are betting that this step could deepen the Moscow crisis rather than solve it.

In his article published in Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Friedman, Professor Emeritus of War Studies at King's College London and author of "Leadership: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine," argues that the latest mobilization decision will have dire consequences for Russia, not only In Ukraine, but in Moscow itself.

Translation text:

In his speech on September 21 about the steps he intends to take to win his war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to explain the reasons for not achieving victory so far, and said that the culprit was NATO, which he accused of providing huge support to Kiev.

Putin pledged that his country would "use all available means" if the territorial integrity of Russia was to be breached, but the meaning of his phrase was left ambiguous, especially with the difficulty of defining the red lines of the intended "Russian territory" given the extreme fluidity of the situation on the ground.

Some saw his phrase as a reference to the referendums held recently in the territories acquired by Moscow in eastern and southern Ukraine. As for his nuclear threat, he explicitly addressed NATO, as he had done previously, in order to deter it from engaging further in efforts to support Ukraine.

We soon learned the step that Putin proposed to turn the scales of the war in his favour, which is his announcement to send more troops, as he issued a decree asking all Russians who received military training in the past to apply for military service, a charge that was described as “partial,” although not easy.

According to the news received by us, it also appears that these days men who did not receive previous military training are being gathered to fight, including students who are supposed to be exempted from military service.

Although it is not clear whether the mobilization will make the desired difference in the course of the war, it has already raised the stakes for Putin at home, as hundreds of men are crowded in a gloomy atmosphere into buses before being transported to the battlefield, while others seek to flee the country, or protest. In the streets despite the tight security measures against the protests in Russia now.

Failure, then, does not seem to be something Putin or his entourage can admit at this point.

At every stage of the war, Putin tirelessly redoubled his efforts, from his thwarting his first attack on Kyiv in February, to his slow progress in Luhansk last summer, and finally, the surprising successes of Ukrainian forces recently in Kharkiv in September. /September.

Instead of looking for a way to reduce his losses and end the war before the situation gets worse, Putin has so far insisted that his goals are achievable, even if his goals have changed over the past months.

The clear battle in Kyiv and the opaque in Moscow

The hierarchy of the Russian military leadership has struggled to keep up with its Ukrainian enemy, who resisted a stubborn and creative resistance, and put the Russians in front of problems in carrying out operations on the ground that they did not expect and were not well prepared for.

More importantly, Putin's first decision to invade in February was confused, as the man looked down on his enemy, his military readiness, and popular trends inside Ukraine.

This misunderstanding led to an arrogant belief that the Ukrainian resistance would collapse with the first Russian onslaught, and that the country would easily succumb to it afterwards.

It does not take a deep knowledge of Ukrainian history to realize how difficult this is, especially since the Russian forces would not have had the ability to subdue a people with such a huge number, assuming that they had already succeeded in forcing the resistance to surrender.

As it now turns out, those faulty assumptions created a deeper problem.

Because Putin did not acknowledge that the invasion of Ukraine was a full-fledged military conflict (it was a “special military operation” as the Russian media called it)*, he soon found himself dependent on too few fighters after his initial offensive turned into a deadly, slow and grinding war. .

As a result, Putin has now had to find new ways to rejuvenate his forces, but now that he has reached a point where it is difficult to change course and regain momentum.

How did Russia reach this extraordinary juncture?

We must understand this situation, not only as a result of the intransigence of the Ukrainians and Western support, but also as the product of a series of military mistakes made by the Russian leadership starting with its initial strategy according to which it launched the invasion.

Ukrainian soldiers on a Russian tank (Getty Images)

In the early days of the war, it was hard to imagine that Russia lacked the forces needed to complete the first phase of its invasion of Ukraine. Its solid military build-up continued for months before the decision to invade in February.

Because Putin left almost everyone - including his top military leaders - guessing how to use those forces, the Russian strategy in the end did not come out after sufficient thought and planning, not to mention that the leaders of the military front were informed of the invasion's intention belatedly, Moscow did not give them enough time to prepare.

The Kremlin has chosen so many separate lines of advance that the war has turned into a series of separate mini wars, each with its own hierarchy of command, without proper mechanisms for coordination and sharing of military resources among them.

Thus, many of Russia's first military steps were rolled back.

Most important of all, Russia failed to seize Kyiv, and failed to destabilize the Ukrainian political leadership, as Ukrainian President "Zelensky" succeeded in mobilizing his people from the capital, and in procuring the necessary equipment and equipment from countries sympathetic to Ukraine.

Despite the Russians' numerical superiority undoubtedly, a clear discrepancy emerged in each side's understanding of its goal of the war, as the Ukrainians are clearly fighting to defend their country and liberate the lands occupied by the Russians (as much as possible), while the Russians do not seem to have clear goals, and they have been waiting for orders. Nothing else (the war began with an explicit Russian aim to bring down Kyiv and the Ukrainian government, and then the failure to adjust the compass quickly led to control of the south and east)*.

It is always expected that great powers fighting a small country will have enough reserve forces to face early failures.

But as for Russia, the military leadership of the battle in Ukraine has given up this advantage (as one of the great powers)*.

A month into the war, Russian forces were forced to withdraw from the north in order to focus on operations in the south and east.

Donbass is the region that Moscow has viewed as the heart of the conflict, and it seemed for a while that with Russian forces stationed to seize the region—using conventional tactics backed by heavy artillery that weaken Ukrainian defenses—the Russians would have the upper hand in the battle over this region.

Although the Ukrainians were not completely overrun, there were fears in Kyiv and among its Western allies that the defensive effort might leave them with insufficient capacity to counterattack.

Therefore, some Western analysts began to argue that the war could end early based on negotiations, which would require Ukraine to cede some territory to Russia for peace.

However, these voices were rarely heard in Ukraine, where the abhorrent treatment of Ukrainians trapped in the occupied territories, and Russia's willingness to bomb civilian areas completely, made the Ukrainians more determined to continue the fight and war.

There was no propaganda axis to "win hearts and minds" in the Russian campaign (similar to the propaganda campaign that the United States launched its war on Iraq in 2003, and succeeded in attracting segments of Iraqis to its ranks in the first months of the invasion, and then motivating the Iraqis to attack Saddam's regime themselves because of their anger at him).

In early September, the Russians were surprised by a majestic Ukrainian attack targeting their forces around Kharkiv, which led to the defeat of the Russian forces on the tenth of the same month, and their chaotic retreat (Reuters)

The Ukrainian forces had taken heavy losses on their shoulders to discourage the Russian advance, but the time this brave resistance took was enough to allow the arrival of more advanced weapons (principally the HIMARS, the US-manufactured high-tech rocket launcher system) and training for Ukrainian forces in their use.

By this time, as Ukraine gradually acquired the ability to target long-range targets with pinpoint accuracy, Russian forces had exhausted the lion's share of their stockpile of guided munitions.

Over the course of July, Russian munitions depots, as well as command and logistical positions and air defense systems, were regularly bombed, undermining Moscow's ability to continue its attacks and thus enabling the Ukrainians to launch one of their largest offensives to liberate the Kherson region in the south.

It seemed that the Ukrainian attack on Kherson was making slow but steady progress when, in early September, the Russians were caught off-guard by a massive Ukrainian attack targeting their forces with a scanty deployment around Kharkiv.

This led to the defeat of the Russian forces on the tenth of the same month, and to their chaotic retreat.

Now, after seven months of war, it is Ukraine's initiative.

These events led to a crisis that Putin sought to resolve in his statement issued on September 21, although his subsequent decisions exacerbated the dilemma facing Russian forces in four ways.

Russia's four sins

Putin made his first mistake once it became clear to him the bad course the war had taken for Russia. The Russian president did not use diplomatic means to end the war and win some gains.

In the weeks after the start of the invasion, Putin did not lack the opportunity to open discussion with other world leaders.

From February to April, direct talks were held between delegations from Russia and Ukraine, including talks sponsored by Turkey and at the level of the Prime Ministers of the two countries.

The talks made some progress on ideas about future Ukrainian neutrality in exchange for security guarantees, but the details were never discussed, and Russia failed to convince the Ukrainians that any concessions they would make would lead to a Russian withdrawal.

After all the Russian crimes on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv's ability to trust Russia's words about anything has faded completely, and Putin's incessant lies have killed his credibility with the international interlocutors who mediated between the two sides.

Equally important, Putin has found no way to make tangible concessions, because accepting less than what he demanded would mean defeat for him.

And when the Kremlin presented a ceasefire proposal last summer, which received positive responses in some Western capitals, Russia also did not offer a single tangible concession because it had not yet tightened its grip on the entire Donbass region.

As for Putin's second sin, it is his miscalculation of the influence he derives from Russian gas and oil.

Putin gambled that his energy crisis by cutting off natural gas supplies to Europe might persuade Western governments to pressure Kyiv to make concessions and withhold military aid.

The supply cuts have already had a dire effect on the European economy, causing energy shortages and soaring inflation, but the supply cuts have been politically counterproductive.

There was no uproar among the Europeans to give up Ukraine in order to ease the economic burden. On the contrary, European officials made lavish efforts in order to reduce their dependence on Russian gas, and thus lost Russia a viable market for it in the field of energy.

Putin's third mistake was to focus on territorial gains in the Donbass after the failure of the first Kyiv offensive.

The attack on the East seemed more feasible and politically logical, and it could be carried out in a deliberate and methodical manner.

But it also meant concentrating Russia's available resources on what is now a tiny strip of a very long front line, and then taking heavy losses in order to make modest gains.

At the same time, the Russian forces continued to underestimate the capabilities of the Ukrainians, while the Russian flaws were revealed with the improvement of Ukrainian capabilities, both in terms of vital Russian assets that were not adequately protected - such as ammunition depots - or in terms of the number of areas that Russia has tightened its control over And you can't defend it enough now.

Moscow lacked reserve forces to reinforce its defenses in the northern and southern regions of the Donbas region - that is, in Kharkiv and Kherson.

Russia's ill-equipped defenses have highlighted the fourth error caused by Putin's choices.

Given that the invasion was designed to be a limited and quick operation - as Putin hoped - it was not accompanied by a complete military mobilization, and the process was not even called a war, which means that Russia did not possess a sufficient number of infantry from the beginning.

Over time, the heavy losses incurred by Russia led to the exhaustion of all other divisions, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Rather than admitting losses, Putin encouraged efforts to find new recruits wherever they could be found, using various means, including bribery, coercion, and coercion.

Indeed, many in uniform - in the Air Force, for example - have been ordered to take on roles for which they were not trained in the first place.

The Wagner Group, a Russian group of mercenaries with close ties to the Kremlin, offered the Russian prisoners to volunteer at the front in exchange for their punishments being dropped.

All of these glitches mean that the Ukrainians were able to move quickly in their attack on Kharkiv last September, with mostly negligible Russian resistance.

Putin is currently seeking to fix the chronic shortage of manpower by mobilizing a large group of people militarily, regardless of the experience they hold and the military roles required of them.

The initial mobilization target is about 300,000 additional troops, although the final number may be much, much higher.

However, the mustering of this number into service without proper equipment (particularly with winter at the door), without training, and without professional officers capable of directing and commanding them;

It is a risk of massacres on the battlefield, and consequently violent reactions inside Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin's decree prevents those who are actually in the front lines serving on short-term contracts from leaving;

This may also lead to a decline in the morale and discipline of the soldiers, which are the problems that have already plagued the Russian forces from the beginning.

A common saying among those worried about Russia's next move is that Putin is impossible to accept.

But in fact, he can actually lose, and perhaps he is on the way to losing.

A series of horrific decisions led to him undermining Russia's international standing and future economic prospects, undermining the Russian Federation's reputation as a serious military power, and failing in the most important gamble of his political career.

As in all wars, the future course of this war will have unexpected sides, but Ukraine, with its clear strategy, good weapons and committed forces, has already grabbed the initiative.

As for the military mobilization announced by Putin, it will not change that fact, while the use of nuclear weapons will make the bad situation now disastrous in every sense of the word.

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This article has been translated from Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily reflect the website of Maidan.

Translation: Karim Muhammad.