The Kremlin acknowledged some of the mass shortcomings facing the 300,000 reservists it is calling up, expressing ‘hope’ the circumstances will improve.
The conscripts that President Vladimir Putin is rushing to the front lines in Ukraine will likely suffer from unsustainably high death rates and ultimately won’t affect Russia’s chances for success, according to new Western assessments of his contentious decision to press 300,000 reservists into service.
The damning analyses of Russia’s mass mobilization effort – which has led to mass protests as well, many of which have turned violent – center on several logistical and bureaucratic failures from the Russian Ministry of Defense down to the local governments. The fundamental flaws reflect a total lack of planning from the Kremlin for the war it launched seven months ago and originally expected would end in victory in days.
Britain’s military intelligence revealed Monday morning that Russia has undermined its own style of training new recruits by having to deploy and send to war the units within its broader brigades that would usually prepare incoming trainees for battle. Western militaries, by contrast, have dedicated training centers outside the deployable combat units that are solely responsible for military-wide training.
And though the Kremlin has said its current mobilization will center on those with combat or trauma experience, many likely have not had military experience for several years.
The lack of military trainers, and the haste with which Russia has started the mobilization, “suggests that many of the drafted troops will deploy to the front line with minimal relevant preparation,” U.K. military intelligence concludes in a new assessment it released Monday morning. “They are likely to suffer a high attrition rate.”
“The process will be ugly, the quality of the reservists poor, and their motivation to fight likely even worse,” independent think tank the Institute for the Study of War wrote in its latest regular assessment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It adds that the self-made problems undermining Putin’s latest effort “are so deep and fundamental that he cannot likely fix them in the coming months—and possibly for years. Putin is likely coming up against the hard limits of Russia’s ability to fight a large-scale war.”
The Kremlin itself has acknowledged some of the issues identified by these latest assessments, including the institute’s observation that the local governments responsible for actually rounding up military-aged males and sending them to training units are not complying with pledges from the Russian Ministry of Defense that some eligible citizens would be exempted, such as students, for example – either the result of an inability for the two bureaucracies to communicate effectively or an unwillingness by the ministry to keep its promises facing a massive troop shortage.