Russia's Severe Ukraine Losses Forcing Putin To Draft More Civilians

Russia's recent failures at Kharkiv, Kursk and now Pokrovsk are revealing the severity of its personnel shortages. 

While the Kremlin - and many western media - have touted Russia's ability to recruit new soldiers, the reality on the ground is that severe casualties, desertions and conscription evasion are resulting in understrength units as well as reserves. Putin does not want to impose another unpopular draft, but has to choose between that or continued degradation or continued military underperformance. JL

Thomas Grove reports in the Wall Street Journal:

A shortage of manpower has been a longstanding problem for Russia, but the problems are becoming more acute. With Moscow’s troops heavily engaged in Pokrovsk, Russia has turned to young, inexperienced conscripts and pulled troops from other parts of the front line in Ukraine to defend Kursk. Ukraine's continuing incursion into Russia is further straining Russia’s manpower, underscoring chronic problems and leading the country’s military leaders to press for mobilization again. Russia’s flagging troop strength became painfully obvious during Russia’s Kharkiv offensive (when it) suffered high casualties and was halted by the Ukrainians.

Months before President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration in May, he met with Defense Ministry officials who pushed for a fresh round of mobilization to recruit more troops to offset Russia’s losses on the front line in Ukraine, said a person briefed on the exchange.

Putin dismissed the idea, saying he wanted to use only those who were voluntarily signing military contracts, the person said.

The exchange highlighted a thorny dilemma facing Putin. While he has resisted a troop mobilization that could come at a political cost, Western estimates suggest Russia is now losing more men on the battlefield than it can recruit to replace them.

Now, Ukraine’s continuing incursion into Russia is further straining Russia’s manpower, underscoring chronic problems and leading the country’s military leaders to press for mobilization again, according to three people familiar with the discussions. More than a month into the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II, Moscow has yet to mount a major counteroffensive to push Ukrainian troops back across the border.

“Forces are currently not sufficient to achieve the original war aims, knock Ukraine out of the war, to undermine its military potential or protect border regions of the Russian territory,” said the person briefed on the exchange with Putin. “More and more people are saying mobilization is inevitable.”

The Russian Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the recruitment of contract soldiers and volunteers is happening at a rapid pace. “This satisfies the needs of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” Peskov said in an email. In Russia, troop mobilizations can include everything from calling up reservists to drafting people of military age into service. Russia’s first post-invasion mobilization in the fall of 2022 sought to add 300,000 to the ranks of the Russian military, by calling up reservists and former soldiers. That effort, which also drafted men with little or no military service, sparked protests and prompted some regions to close borders to keep men from fleeing.

The pressure to do another mobilization comes as the casualties in the war in Ukraine have reached roughly one million, The Wall Street Journal has reported. To be sure, Russia has a manpower advantage over Ukraine, which has a population less than one-quarter of the size of its giant neighbor.

Still, a shortage of manpower has been a longstanding problem for Russia, where paramilitary Wagner forces recruited inmates to serve at the front earlier in the war. Russia’s problems are becoming more acute. With Moscow’s troops heavily engaged in capturing the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Russia has turned to young and inexperienced conscripts and pulled troops from other parts of the front line in Ukraine to defend Russian territory. “Russia didn’t take the bait in sending crucial front-line soldiers to Kursk, but given their constraints, they’ve been forced to take troops from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia where they’re less needed,” said Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a U.S. foreign-policy think tank.

A mobile military-service recruitment center was set up outside a railroad station in Russia. Photo: Anatoly Maltsev/Shutterstock

Troops that have been sent to the Kursk region include units from the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade based in Crimea, the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade and the 56th Airborne Regiment, which had been fighting in Zaporizhzhia, said a report from the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Kursk Gov. Aleksei Smirnov said late last month that new detachments would be formed specifically to counter the Ukrainians. The Institute for the Study of War said the reshuffling of troops “avoided declaring general mobilization or another round of partial mobilization, both of which would be incredibly unpopular among Russian society.”

 

Until now, Russia has managed to maintain troop levels by recruiting volunteers. In mid-July, the Defense Ministry said it had recruited around 190,000 men since the start of the year, and Russian and Western estimates show Moscow is recruiting about 1,000 men every day from across the country.

But Russia has gained ground in eastern Ukraine by throwing successive waves of soldiers at Ukrainian lines. That is leading to a high number of fatalities, with U.K. Defense Minister John Healey telling Parliament this month that the U.K. estimated Russia was losing 1,100 soldiers a day.

In July, Putin tried to boost troop numbers by doubling a one-time payment for new recruits to 400,000 rubles, or roughly $4,300, a huge sum in many parts of Russia. Some 8% of the Russian budget is now dedicated to paying for military personnel, Western officials say. 

 

Russia’s flagging troop strength became painfully obvious during Russia’s offensive earlier this year on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Russian forces gained ground but the offensive, which was launched in May and continued over the summer, suffered high casualties and was halted by the Ukrainians.

“The tempo of our progress has slowed,” veteran military correspondent Yuri Kotenok wrote in a post on his Telegram Channel in late July. “For those who don’t understand, there is PHYSICALLY NO ONE to carry out attacks.”

Kotenok said part of the logic of driving forward at all costs was the desire by commanders to be in the best position possible on the battlefield if talks start later this year. At the meeting with Putin earlier this year, Defense Ministry officials said the president should use his inauguration, and attendant boost in political support, to make the case for a mobilization.

Putin declined to do so, with memories of the unrest that followed the 2022 mobilization still fresh. Protests gripped some of Russia’s biggest cities, recruitment offices were attacked, and border crossings were choked with men fleeing.

 

Russian leaders also fear that a mobilization could upset a delicate balance that they have tried to strike in the public’s perception of the war. Russian media and state propaganda has sought to portray the war as a heroic but distant conflict. They want Russians to feel they can continue to enjoy a normal life, along with rising incomes and greater redistribution of wealth as a result of the war.

“While the balance between the demands of the front and the supply of manpower is a delicate one, for now Moscow is handling the situation the best it can,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of Moscow-based think tank the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. “What they choose to do in the future is all about priorities.”

A new mobilization would bring the war home to more Russians, something Putin would have to justify with sharper rhetoric. Tying more Russians to the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine could have dangerous political implications for Putin. “People want to continue their lives, which for them are peaceful. It’s dangerous for the Kremlin to carry out another partial or full mobilization,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, an independent Russia analyst, based in Moscow.

Data from Levada Center, Russia’s only remaining independent pollster, showed 46% of the population feared a new mobilization wave could be possible because of the war, 12 percentage points higher than in February of this year, the last time the question was asked. But since the Kursk invasion, support for the continuation of the war is back up to 41% after dropping slightly in favor of peace negotiations in recent months.