What Putin’s Call for a Troops Increase Means for the War in Ukraine

There are a few possibilities.

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Russia has a virtually unlimited supply of some of the most important supplies for its war against Ukraine: fuel and ammunition (though recent reports that Russia needs help from North Korean to get ammunition means it might be running short on some important kinds). Yet the invading force lacks an abundant supply of men. Vladimir Putin is looking to change that. 

In late August Putin issued a decree to raise the official number of Russian military personnel to 1.15 million by January 2023, an increase of 137,000 from its current level. This is is not a full mobilization, but it shows Putin is not giving up on the war. Or, at the very least, he wants to send a signal that he is not giving up.

Drawing from a seemingly unlimited supply of military recruits from Russia’s vast peasantry helped make the country a great power in earlier centuries. Those days are over. The Russian army already was facing the effects of a national fertility rate that had collapsed to 1.5 births per woman by 2020. Besides that, Putin has pledged that only volunteers will be used in front-line units. So far he has refused to publicly call for an expanded draft or force a large number of reservists to serve in Ukraine.

The lion’s share of Russia’s combat forces deployed to Ukraine expecting a swift victory in February. Some analysts predicted well-trained and handsomely equipped Russian troops would destroy the Ukrainian state and occupy major cities early on, with under-resourced but highly motivated Ukrainian partisans grinding down the occupation forces. But the Ukrainian state survived, the Ukrainian military remains intact and is still killing Russian soldiers at a good clip. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Matt J

    Let's get this clear: Russia has no path to victory in this war. They're losing territory at a rate comparable to a bar of soap in the tub. They have failed to achieve naval or air superiority against a nation with no boats and few planes. Their most effective strategy thus far has been overwhelming artillery barrages, and HIMARS have put the kibosh on that one by blowing up their ammo dumps. The only thing an increase in troops will do is maintain the status quo, which they are, once again, losing. Whatever shells they can scrounge from North Korea will be no more HIMARS-proof than their own, and their new troops will be even worse equipped than the ones currently ceding territory. All they can do is try to slow down the rate at which they are losing.

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    George.Skinner

    It seems that Russia has primarily been using conscripts drawn from ethnic minorities and more remote regions. That's had the advantage of furthering Putin's bias towards Great Russian dominance, and also limiting the spread of information regarding the actual state of fighting in Ukraine. Eventually Putin will need to draw recruits from bigger centers, and that's going to make information control much more difficult. Russia has burned through their top equipment and used up their better trained formations. Reinforcements are now using 2nd or 3rd tier equipment against a progressively better equipped and hardened Ukrainian opposition, and their casualty rates are going to be higher. When people start noticing young men they know coming home wounded, or dropping out of sight after being recruited, they're going to start figuring out how costly this is for Russia.

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    Jake P

    Britain did that in WWI with enlisting a group of young men/boys all from the same town/community but had truly devastating effects on the town/community when the unit would have large losses and it was all from that one small town/community. Really put stress on the government when you loss all the young men from the block on the same day.

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  4. Avatar photo
    MatthewRobin

    "Russia has a virtually unlimited supply of some of the most important supplies for its war against Ukraine: fuel and ammunition (though recent reports that Russia needs help from North Korean to get ammunition means it might be running short on some important kinds)."

    Don't forget about the Iranian drones, I would not be surprised if Russia also buys ballistic missiles from them as well.

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  5. Duane Truitt

    Warm bodies don't result in military victories. History is replete with documented battles won by forces with inferior numbers. What matters far more than numbers is leadership, training, and morale. Russia is lacking in all three areas in their war against Ukraine.

    Ukraine, contrary to common misperception, is not a small country. Ukraine is one of the largest nations in Europe in both population and land area, with a substantial industrial base, and of course, energetically aided by its European neighbors and NATO nations intent on not letting Russia pick off the rest of Ukraine after its "little green men" invasion of 2014 was allowed to proceed with virtual impunity.

    People may not realize it, but Nazi Germany easily defeated the French, English, Dutch and Belgians in the spring of 1940, despite having vastly fewer numbers of soldiers than the defenders, and despite he fact that most of the time defenders have an easier time than invader. In the runup to the Dunkirk evacuation, the Wehrmact numbered 2.5 million men, a large proportion of which were stationed in Poland to defend against a possible Soviet invasion, less than half the size of the French army of 5 million soldiers, plus another 1.3 million from Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK. Effectively the Germans won with only 1/3 the army of the defenders.

    But the Germans won the Battle of France, along with Belgium and the Netherlands because they had far more competent and imaginative and aggressive leadership than did the allies, and their soldiers were experienced fighters (from invading and defeating Poland half a year earlier). Their soldiers were better trained and better equipped for highly mobile "lightning" or "blitzkrieg" attack. The UK barely escaped total defeat and invasion with their successful evacuation at Dunkirk and the effectiveness of their air defenses in the Battle of Britain a few months later.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Chris L

    Not for nothing, I keep seeing the Russian casualty numbers in 6mos of Ukraine being so much higher than in 10y of Afghanistan, to illustrate how poorly Russia is doing. I instead see it as highlighting Putin's depravity and indifference to his own people in such a fool's errand, evidently far worse than Brezhnev.

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