“In the short to medium term, Russia is not capable of producing much more effective conventional power than it has already developed,” said George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “Of the observed units that the Russians could have pulled to go into Ukraine, almost every existing maneuver brigade and regiment within the Russian military has been deployed and taken some form of combat casualties,” Baros told Newsweek. “We estimate that they have virtually no pristine regimental or brigade reserves at home from which to draw.” Despite Russia’s status as an authoritarian state with a conscription system that rotates about a quarter of a million young men into the armed forces each year, the country’s ability to put additional troops in the field is limited by political, logistical and human factors. Instead of making a formal declaration of war and calling up its reservists, the Kremlin tried to replenish the ranks of the army with volunteers recruited from the provinces. An Orthodox priest blesses Russian conscripts at the military registration and registration office in St. Petersburg on October 20, 2016. In Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, the Kremlin’s political leadership has gone to great lengths to avoid sending non-contracted Russian soldiers into battle. OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP via Getty Images “The way the Russians have gone about producing forces shows a strong desire to avoid mass mobilization, because if they could have done it, they probably would have done it already,” Barros said. But Russia has not taken such a step and there are no signs that it is about to do so. “Instead, Russia is increasing its economic incentives to prey on the economically vulnerable,” he added. “There is footage from training grounds that shows who is signing up and they are not the kinds of people who would perform well in combat situations even if they were given the proper training, which they are not.” It will be interesting to see how/if the volunteers who make up the 3AC can accomplish their aggressive goals. For the most part, the unit is manned by older, often out of shape, men. One of the units that make up 3AC is this volunteer battalion from Bashkortostan. pic.twitter.com/wAH87HvX6l — tom (@tom_bullock_) August 27, 2022 Tom Bullock of Jane’s Intel expressed skepticism that Russia’s new all-volunteer units are capable of solving the manpower shortage. Despite the fact that, on paper, so many Russians of military age have military experience, there appears to be no quick fix for Russia’s manpower shortage. Even if the Kremlin leadership were to shift talent and put its reserves in uniform, there is serious question about how quickly these calls could be turned into an effective fighting force. “It legitimately takes a long time to form a good soldier, and it takes even longer to take a bunch of good soldiers and put them in a unit, drill them, have them go out and successfully complete tactical tasks in the field battle,” Baros said. explained. “Because of the very high attrition rates that the Russian officer corps has suffered in Ukraine, it will take a generation to retrain the kind of military leadership necessary to effectively coordinate all these moving pieces.” The Russian military’s problems extend to equipment. By all indications, Russia’s stockpiles of Soviet-era artillery shells and similar low-tech kit remain plentiful. But stockpiles of more sophisticated weapons may be running low, and Western sanctions against dual-use technologies make it harder for Russia to replace used supplies of weapons systems that depend on imported components. “Russia is making efforts to maintain its stockpile of precision munitions,” Dr. Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior researcher at the Center for Naval Analysis, told Newsweek. “At first, they didn’t hold back very much because they didn’t seem to expect the war in Ukraine to last more than two or three weeks, so they kind of followed a shock and awe strategy thinking they wouldn’t have. But now, they’re starting to use them more judiciously.” . On the manpower side of the equation, Gorenburg agreed that without a dramatic domestic policy shift toward mass mobilization, Russia is not capable of producing the amount of forces needed to make a significant difference to the battlefield situation. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to recruit as people hear stories about the lack of training, about the actual conditions in Ukraine, about the casualty levels in these hastily formed units,” he said. “If the economy continues to deteriorate, they will continue to attract people from poorer areas who have no better alternatives, but we are not talking about a sudden influx of 100,000 troops.” Russian messages in this regard do not match their actions. In July, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that providing Western long-range weapons to Ukraine meant that Russia’s geographic tasks would shift from their current lines. Kremlin-backed domestic propagandists continue to call for an expansion of Russia’s war to include targets in NATO countries. Vladimir Putin recently signed a widely publicized order calling on the armed forces to increase the number of combat personnel by 137,000. However, despite the explosion, neither mass mobilization nor the promised Russian escalation of the war has taken place. “Russia is already short of manpower just from the fighting in Ukraine,” Gorenburg said. “What are they going to do, say, ‘Oh, you sent ATACM, now we’re going to launch an air strike on Poland?’ It doesn’t make sense in terms of capabilities.” Even if more new recruits come in and train this year, with attrition and turnover in the Russian military, the overall size of the force is not guaranteed to increase. “Realistically, there will be people who leave the military, saying, ‘I’ve had enough, I’m leaving,’” Gorenburg added. “A net increase of 10,000-20,000 is certainly possible, but without a call for mass mobilization, I would put the range at something like negative 30,000 to positive 20,000.”
