Brian M Downing
Putin’s war is in the seventh month. Offensives fail. Casualties mount. Operations go nowhere. Depleted BTGs have to be combined to hold up effectiveness. Russia is facing a manpower problem. It has to find recruits, train and motivate them, and integrate them into units along the sprawling Ukrainian front. It won’t be easy.
Russian casualties
After months of heavy fighting, Russia has suffered substantial perhaps staggering casualties. The state isn’t forthcoming with casualties, which invites suspicion the numbers are high.
Ukraine estimates 50,000 Russian KIAs, but even admirable allies can overstate things, intentionally or not. US estimates are 15,000. Given the severity of early defeats in the north and the intensity of protracted ground attacks against fortified positions in the east, the US figure is almost certainly quite low.
Whatever the losses are, Moscow isn’t hiding an urgent need for replacements. It has several efforts underway, including inducting criminals and the homeless. They make for intriguing stories but aren’t likely to be major efforts. There are more significant ones.
Public support
The view here is that the war is quite popular with most Russians. Putin is able to present the conflict in terms of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) when Western enemies tried to vanquish Russia. The nation rallied to Stalin, a great victory was won, and a formidable empire was carved out.
In Russian thinking, Ukraine is a proxy armed and supported by Western enemies. It must be defeated and wiped off the map. Kyiv delenda est. Russians are willing to endure sanctions and hardships to win the war and restore imperial greatness. But the manpower drive is showing limits on nationalist ardor.
National recruitment
Support isn’t translating into eagerness to serve in the army, let alone in the war. Recruitment drives haven’t been successful. The public is willing to cheer the troops, heap scorn on protesters, and boast chauvinistically while abroad, but donning uniforms and hefting Kalashnikovs in the steppes are quite different.
Public support figures are based on all ages including the elderly, many of whom have personal recollections of WW2. Putin’s justifications and imagery ring true with them. Middle-aged people were acculturated in WW2 myths. Some served in Afghanistan. They resent the collapse of national prestige in nineties and most yearn for restoration. The elderly and middle-aged are important for polling data but not for manpower needs.
In younger cohorts, WW2 memories are receding echoes from old-timers. Restoring national greatness has attractions but personal involvement in the effort doesn’t. Many prefer the lifestyles of European and American youth. Paradoxically, Putin takes credit for an economic miracle which allowed young Russians to enjoy Western lifestyles, just not Western rights.
Military service isn’t despised but careers and lifestyles are more attractive. This of course is far more prevalent in big cities than in small towns and rural expanses.
Conscription
Putin has the draft at his disposal. This gives him the legal authority to tap into a large youth cohort. However, the same Western youth culture that limits volunteers presents problems with conscripts.
Putin has thus far been reluctant to draw deeply from the draft reservoir. This is likely because of concern with protests, refusal, and emigration. Putin should know, from years in the KGB or knowledge of history or reading Dostoyevsky, that disaffected Russian youth are capable of terrorism. There’ve already been a few fire-bombings of recruitment and conscription centers.
Russia is already seeing a brain-drain as young men, fearing war service, are heading to the West. Russia needs engineers, software designers, teachers, and other professionals – all the more when sanctions bite into the economy next year and beyond.
Provincial recruitment
In recent weeks Putin has charged oblast officials with raising volunteer groups. The effort is concentrated in poor, remote areas, often Asian-populated regions east of the Urals. Men from Tuva and Buryatia in Central Asia are already well represented in the army. Recruitment also taps into now independent states such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The drive isn’t prominent in Moscow.
Recruits respond to pay incentives, opportunity, adventure, patriotism and remarkably brief terms of service. Training lasts five weeks and enlistments end after a year. They will be of little effectiveness upon reaching their units and will finish their enlistments before acquiring significant experience. Many will not last that long.
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Neither recruitment nor conscription is getting Putin his quotas. Perceptions of stalemate, reports from discouraged vets, and rumors of higher than reported casualties are becoming common, especially with young people, and that will worsen manpower problems.
The army is undermanned and subject to daily attrition from increasingly sophisticated weapons and growing partisan operations. Experienced soldiers will see obvious and infuriating deficiencies, qualitative and quantitative, in the replacements serving beside them.
©2022 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.