Is Russia Preparing for a Second Mobilisation?

this video is brought to you by brilliant last week the Upper House of Russia's legislature the state Duma rushed through a law that would raise the maximum conscription age by three years from 27 to 30. while this law won't come into Force until probably January at the earliest it does suggest that Putin is gearing up for a long war and possibly a second mobilization in the near future so in this video we're going to try and figure out what Putin is going to do next whether he'll go for a second mobilization and what this says about his strategic thinking before we start if you haven't already please consider subscribing and ringing the bell to stay in the loop and be notified when we release new videos so before we get into the legislation we just mentioned a little bit of context about mobilization in Russia since he came to power about 20 years ago one of Putin's Hallmark policies has been Shifting the Russian army away from a conscript Army towards what might be described as a more professional military for context there were basically two ways to do an army you can either do it via conscription which means requiring that some section of the population usually all young men receive some military training and then stand as reserves in the event of a conflict or you can do it with professional soldiers which means using well contracted soldiers who spend all their time training instead of just a year or so from the government's perspective there are pros and cons to both options professional armies are more effective and politically easier because people don't really like when conscripts get sent to fight but conscript armies are cheaper and bigger many countries have what we might call hybrid armies which use both professional soldiers and conscripts when Putin came to power in 1999 the Russian army still relied heavily on mass mobilization of conscripts a system inherited from the Soviet Union it had very few professional soldiers and while it had a lot of troops on paper in practice it had very few functioning units and the entire Army was beset by corruption there were also brutal hazing rituals which resulted in catastrophic levels of troop retention and occasionally the death or Serious injury of new conscripts for these reasons conscription was deeply unpopular with most Russians and by the time Putin came to power young Russian men were so desperate to avoid the draft that nearly 90 percent had found some form of exception with the remaining 10 percent often too poor to bribe their way out of the draft this is why one of Putin's big policies when he first came to power was to move away from a conscript Army towards a hybrid army with a large enough contingent of professional troops such that it wouldn't really have to use commscripts this really began in Earnest in 2008 when Russia began a massive program of military reform under the plan the Kremlin wanted to recruit about 50 000 contract soldiers every year from 2012 until 2017 bringing the total number of contract soldiers up to about 425 000 by 2017. the Russian Ministry of Defense has not publicly disclosed the number of soldiers contracted under this recruitment drive but even if they fell short the Russian army is clearly far less reliant on conscription than it was when Putin first came to power today Russia still has conscription which requires most young men to serve a year in the military before moving into Reserve both estimates suggest that contracted soldiers and officers account for about 75 percent of the Russian army before Ukraine and the Russian army was able to flex its muscles in places like Georgia Syria and donbass without using conscripts originally Putin wanted to avoid using conscripts in Ukraine the first advance in February involved only contracted troops but once it became clear that Russia was struggling to achieve its maximalist goals in Ukraine they started using commscripts Putin knew this was going to be politically controversial so he lied about it on March the 5th 2022 Putin claimed that no conscripts were being used in Ukraine and that there would be no mobilization is possible foreign aggressive concrete known as the questions about three days later reports of conscripts on the front lines surfaced on Russian telegram channels and the Russian Ministry of defense was forced to make a humiliating U-turn admitting that a small number of conscripts had been taken prisoner in Ukraine there were also reports that conscripts were being forced to sign contracts so the Kremlin could disingenuously pass them off as professional soldiers but after a couple of months it became clear that the Russian army needed more troops and on September the 21st Putin announced his partial mobilization the partial mobilization aimed to Levy 300 000 reservists that is Russians who've performed some form of military service to fight in Ukraine it's hard to know how many reservists were actually mobilized because the data is classified but it's clearly not been enough because last week Russia's State Duma started laying the groundwork for what looks like another round of mobilization under the new legislation which was passed by the Upper House on Thursday the maximum age for conscription would be raised from 27 to 30 broadening the pool of potential conscripts by more than 2 million men in the next couple of years Andre Carter polov the head of the juma's defense committee was explicit about the Bill's intention he said the bill was written for a big war and general mobilization and that it's already beginning to smell like a big war ahead this bill isn't expected to be signed into law until about January so it's unlikely to make an immediate difference to the situation on the battlefield but it's still bad news for Ukraine because it suggests that Putin is preparing for a long War with a front line stabilizing there's been speculation that Putin and zelensky might be ready to restart peace or ceasefire negotiations but the fact that Putin is laying the groundwork for another mobilization suggests that he has little interest in negotiations or so-called off-ramps and is instead trying to grind down Ukraine and its allies in a sense this should be unsurprising Putin's so-called special military operation clearly hasn't fulfilled its goals and it would be a risk from the kremlin's perspective to sue for peace now especially given how unstable Putin's regime is currently looking in the aftermath of Wagner's attempted coup furthermore Putin clearly can't rely on the Russian Army's Superior tactical abilities so a slow burning attritional campaign is his next best bet Russia has the Manpower and the resources to wear down Ukraine and Putin will be hoping that Western enthusiasm for Ukraine will Wane over time assuming that Putin doesn't get cold feet and that he can survive the political blowback associated with another mobilization this presents Ukraine's Western allies with a bit of a dilemma either they can step up support for Ukraine now and hope that Ukraine makes enough progress in the near term to force Putin to the negotiating table or they can bed in improve their industrial capacity and get ready to support Ukraine in a nutritional battle that might last a few years understanding what Ukraine is and will decide to do is tricky not least because it's increasingly difficult to tell what's real and fake with AI and machine learning pushing us into new Realms of deception it's even easy to manipulate and deceptively use data that's why as part of our journalism at tldr we're brushing up on our data and Analysis skills over on brilliant for instance they're predicting with probability course has helped us better understand how projections and forecasts work and and therefore help understand when there's something suspicious going on with government forecasting or take their hypothesis testing course which allows us to better analyze people's claims and 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Channel: TLDR News EU

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Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023