- Joined
- Feb 4, 2020
700k, which would include men outside of fighting age and people with disabilities, there is no reason necessarily to think that this has had a major impact on the availability of fighting power.
It's not the welfare costs in monetary terms, it's the requirement to sustain these people, house them, cloth them, provide medical services for them, educate them. The whole burden on the Ukrainian state for those 7 million people has effectively been palmed off to other nations. That frees up a lot of capacity to support the war. A tangential example you could point to was rationing in the UK in WWII, on paper it wasn't required as the UK could continue to import most of the food it wanted and it could afford to do so - yet it didn't, because they recognised their shipping capacity was limited regardless of the amount of money they could throw at it and therefore reducing food imports increased capacity for imports of weapons and other supplies for the war. So no, when we get to the specifics of what it requires to sustain 7 million people, this will free a lot of capacity for the Ukrainian state that it would otherwise need to us to keep these people from dying.
Russians are not really switched on politically, and those that are tend towards being Vatniks. This is because of how the Russian state controls the media - so while I do not doubt those opinion polls are genuine, I will question what it tells us about the opinion of your average Russian. With such high support for the war, you wouldn't expect them to have bus people into their annexation concert, just look at the difference with their celebration for the annexation of Crimea - one is genuine, the other looks entirely staged. It is an indicator. People fleeing, that's another one. What we do not see are mass expressions of support, and interviews with most of these mobilised conscripts are people begrudgingly accepting their fate.
We do not need to pretend that, we know the majority of these "reservists" are people with very minimalist military training of dubious quality, and that they have not served in years. Military skills are subject to skill fade, and unless you were a long term professional soldier - not a conscript for a year who did basic training if that - your memory of what to do will be basically gone. You may be able to pick things up quicker than your average person, but these people are not soldiers. I have seen that sort of skill fade, the real wishful thinking is to pretend that it isn't there.
There are trainers, but again very few because their standard training system requires people to get trained at their units which are mostly deployed. So they've had to scramble for other options. This means they either compromise massively on quality - having people without experience train them - or their training capacity will be extremely limited.
It's not entirely wrong that numbers might have benefits, especially for rear echelon and guarding - but, again how are these men going to be supplied, how will they maintain secure communications, can they mutually support one another or will they be easily surrounded and defeated in detail because they lack mobility or awareness of the battlefield? These are all things that untrained civilians with a gun cannot do, and unlike the Taliban or guerrilla movements they cannot evade capture by blending in with the locals because the locals fucking hate them. The Ukrainians also benefitted from the man portable weapons the West designed specifically to defeat an armoured Russian assault, the Russian equivalents are not as capable and I doubt their higher end ATGMs would be given to these conscripts. So no, they would be very vulnerable even around Kharkiv, because without secure Comms which Russia they wouldn't even be able to communicate they were being attacked.
Lets just consider a very basic scenario - food. You've just had an influx of 100k troops with basic training and very little in the way of people to show them the ropes. They don't have enough radios, and you have very stretched capacity for logistics. How do you know when they need food, ammunition or anything? Where are they, where do you find them? Do you have maps, are they in date, can you even read them?
If the answer to the above is, oh shit this was a rushed mess and we have no fucking clue, those men are not going to be any use to anyone in a few days time.
I said earlier that Russian forces aren't going to just stop existing, but that we will see a progressive degredation of capabilities. Missile strikes are a great example of this, their high end cruise missiles were used often and en masse early in the war, they did not perform well in fairness, but this is likely due to the fact Russia seem incapable of employing target acquisition in a timely manner - and I think the US fucked with their ability to use GPS so their accuracy was reduced from what was seen in Syria, but don't quote me on that - however they have since been using repurposed Anti Ship Missiles and S300 Missiles in ground attack mode. These are less than ideal, and not that accurate and as we are seeing they are increasingly being used as terror weapons - hitting apartments rather than targets of military value. This is exactly what we would expect as Russia has run out of it's top end capabilities and if we look at their Kalibre production capacity its nowhere near high end to make a material difference to the wars outcome. So now their once feared deep strike capability is basically just a terror weapon, and that will not have an effect on the wars outcome.
Russia is already reaching deep into it's stocks, and the OSINT on available Russian tanks and AFVs in deep storage do not paint a picture of a nation that can keep this up. They've been confirmed to have lost 1,300 tanks already. Lets not get into tank crews and the skills required to drive the fucking things - so we are going to see less capable crews, with less reliable tanks that are less capable than what they had already lost. The idea they can sustain that is laughable, it's just not true.
We are going to have a mass army, that isn't equipped to fight a modern war and they will get absolutely smashed. You can talk about not requiring parity, but when capability becomes so lop sided the mass they bring will be almost useless. Thousands of untrained, unmotivated, badly equipped soldiers being throw into the fray with a supply system that already struggles to support the Russian forces that are already in the field will generate little in the way of useful combat power. Maybe you could stabilise a frontline, but once there is a breakthrough their lack of communications, training and effective weapons will leave them unable to react.
No, the one engaging in magical thinking is you - you look at Russia being a bigger country and think, well actually if we say even if they have 2 losses for each Ukrainian they will win. However, this is ignoring that combat power isn't a formula and the multitude of factors involved in producing it are hard to quantify - but the results are easy for all to see. So yes, could they field a bigger army? Sure, but is there any evidence they could train, equip and sustain it? I guess technically the jury is out, but the evidence seems to suggest a resounding no to that, if we mean giving them the very basic training and equipment required to fight in a modern high intensity battlefield. Given they couldn't even properly equip and sustain the 200k troops they have already sent in...
