Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced that he will activate 300,000 reservists to bolster his disastrous campaign in Ukraine nearly seven months after his professional army has produced little more than a quagmire there.
Shortly after the president delivered the news of his precarious gamble in a seven-minute speech – which included unsubtle references to nuclear weapons – the Russian Ministry of Defense insisted that it could draw from as many as 25 million eligible Russians for the new call-up but would limit itself to only 1% of those, chiefly those with combat and military experience.
The move represents a dramatic decision and one that Putin has conspicuously avoided until now. Analysts believe he feared turning public opinion away from a war that, despite harsh Western sanctions, has so far not significantly affected the average citizen. And a mass mobilization for a campaign he insists on calling only a “special military operation” also amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that he is losing, or at least not winning, against what he and the West considered an inferior military power in Ukraine.
Despite the latest assertions and others from Russian officials insisting that somehow the war is going their way, passenger flights out of Russia almost immediately became fully booked as one of the first signs the local population is now swiftly losing confidence in what the White House routinely calls Putin’s “war of choice.”
Putin is betting that his decision to draw troops from within the Russian public will break the momentum Ukraine has systematically gathered in recent weeks following surprise twin offensives that have routed Russian forces from among their most strategically critical positions in the war zone.
“Putin just put the noose around his own neck. Mobilization isn’t a military decision, so much as a way to try to control the narrative about the war that he realizes he’s losing,” Matthew Schmidt, a professor at the University of New Haven and an expert on strategic national security analysis, said in an email.
Putin is betting that his decision to draw troops from within the Russian public will break the momentum Ukraine has systematically gathered in recent weeks following surprise twin offensives that have routed Russian forces from among their most strategically critical positions in the war zone.
“Putin just put the noose around his own neck. Mobilization isn’t a military decision, so much as a way to try to control the narrative about the war that he realizes he’s losing,” Matthew Schmidt, a professor at the University of New Haven and an expert on strategic national security analysis, said in an email.
The embattled Russian leader has failed to hide his military’s disastrous losses in Ukraine, so his high-profile speech served as an attempt to recast the enemies Russia faces as not just what he considers the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv but rather NATO as a whole.