Even among Kremlin supporters, it is increasingly clear that the heavy casualties caused by Russian forces have failed to break the stalemate in Donbass. The Association of Senior Officers has publicly asked Vladimir Putin to drop the label of “special military action” because he wanted to call for his invasion and declare war on Ukraine so that he could seek a massive mobilization of Russians. The Moscow Times reports that mobile recruitment vans are increasingly found throughout Russia, with Ukrainian civil servants announcing that the Kremlin will begin removing obsolete Soviet T-62 tanks from warehouses. Its forces.
Recent developments in the suburbs of Severdonetsk, which seeks to encircle the largest city under Ukrainian control in Lukansk, were also based on the suppression of artillery barrage. At the same time, after the failure of brave attacks in the first moments of the invasion, Russian commanders are afraid to risk their infantry and mechanized forces.
This causes less fear for citizens trapped in the middle of Russian progress. The Kremlin is trying to “destroy Serverdonetsk from the face of the earth,” Lukansk governor Sergei Haidoi warned in a telegram, sharing some maps of the siege of Mariupol, where two hundred bodies were found in the basement. This Monday, local authorities condemned it. In Severodonetsk, Putin’s regime was again accused this weekend of destroying one of the city’s bridges to prevent civilians from fleeing. And the governor of Lukansk lamented that “if they destroy one more bridge, unfortunately the city will be completely isolated.”
The Russians’ reliance on their artillery is seen as a sign of a chronic shortage of human resources. But the Kremlin is well aware that mobilization will be largely unpopular, with Molotov facing more than a dozen attacks on recruitment centers this month using cocktails.
“Molotov cocktails are a canary in a coal mine,” Frederick Kagan, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, told foreign policy, referring to the miners’ old trick of detecting toxic gases. However, Russia, which has been forced to reunite with its tactical team battalions, is struggling to reconcile, creating what some analysts describe as “Frankenstein-groups” – and the need to quickly build troops. You want to regain momentum.
So it was only last week that the Russian parliament, or Duma, received a proposal from Putin’s party, United Russia, to raise the maximum age currently set at 40 to attract veterans. An employer in Chechnya offered an initial bonus of 300,000 rubles (approximately five thousand euros) to a journalist from Radio Free Europe.
The Kremlin “shaves the bottom of the pot, looking for everything it can find,” said Frederick Kagan. So far, the Financial Times has reported that more than 1,000 Russian and Syrian mercenaries have fled Libya, where they have backed the forces of the warrior Khalifa Habtar, while a section of Russian troops stationed in Syria has withdrawn, stressing that “there is growing concern for Israel.” The Times of Israel fears that the regime of Bashar al-Assad will begin to rely more on the support of Hezbollah and Iranian militants.
Moscow sent troops against Ukraine from Abkhazia, two separate territories of South Ossetia and Georgia. This could explain the promise of the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Pesco this Tuesday not to hold a referendum on South Ossetia’s independence for now, otherwise it will open up another front.
However, most of the troops stationed by the Kremlin in Ukraine are from the vast part of Russia. Especially from poor ethnic minorities living near its vast borders, Buddhists, Muslims or shamanists.
Alexei Kovalev, Medusa’s top correspondent, accused in an article on foreign policy that “this is the dirty secret of the Russian armed forces.”
“It looks like they are fighting disproportionately in the Kremlin army and dying,” Kovalev continued. “People of Russian descent, especially from affluent areas such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, avoid working at the forefront, especially by avoiding recruitment.” Not surprisingly, a young Siberian sergeant who was first convicted of war crimes during the invasion grew up near Mongolia.
