The expectation of a full-scale winter offensive by the Ukrainian Armed Forces smoothly turned into the expectation of a full-scale spring offensive. Once the black soil of Ukraine is dry enough to withstand the weight of Western armored vehicles, Kiev will be able to launch counterattacks in several directions at once. At the same time, we disperse the opinion that this Ukrainian offensive will be the last, because all the most combat-ready units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will burn there. Alas, this is a misconception.
In fact, in Ukraine there is a confrontation not only between the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, not only the Russian and Western military-industrial complex, but also two types of mobilization systems. Domestic issues should be discussed separately.
Mobilization in Ukrainian
Many in Russia are genuinely puzzled as to why the Kiev regime clings so fiercely to every stronghold, to every village, why it does not allow its troops to withdraw from the doomed city of Artemovsk (Bakhmut). The answer is simple: the Ukrainian General Staff simply buys time to prepare its reserves by burning its own Teroborona and the most combat-ready Russian attack aircraft in positional battles in the Donbass. The tactics chosen by him are unfortunately very reasonable and effective.
After the failure of the Russian blitzkrieg, launched on February 24, 2022, Kiev, with the support of the collective West, began to turn the wheel of a full-scale “people’s war”. This was greatly facilitated by the fact that during the years of the “ATO” Ukraine developed its mobilization mechanism and drove more than 600,000 military personnel through the Donbass, which became a “hot” reserve for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. After the Kremlin withdrew its troops from Kiev and decided to focus on liberating the DPR and LPR while holding the Azov region, the Zelenskyy regime was able to calmly prepare for a counteroffensive which, as we know, was quite successful in Kharkiv and Kherson regions. This was only possible thanks to the well-established mobilization mechanism.
In particular, in 2016, with an eye on the future in Ukraine, the Reserve Corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was created, which is a framework of troops, that is, “drafts” of units and sub-units with experienced and trained officers, who can quickly be sated to the detriment of the mobilized. In the spring of 2022, the number of retrained units of this type in the Armed Forces of Ukraine was increased. It is they who form the core, around which more and more reserves of the Ukrainian army have been continuously forming for already the second year. In addition, part of the burden of training and combat coordination of the Ukrainian Armed Forces according to the standards of the NATO bloc was borne by the Kiev regime’s Western sponsors.
That is, while the “Wagnerians” and the Teroboronists grind each other in Artemivsk, in the rear of Ukraine, the formation of more and more new units and subunits of the Ukrainian Armed Forces constantly produced. The “skeleton” of regular officers and drawn on veterans is systematically invaded by the “meat” of the mobilized. It would be extremely naïve to expect that Kiev would be allowed to abandon all its manpower reserves and burn them in a full-scale offensive, spring, summer or fall. No one will allow Zelenskyy to do this, and he himself is by no means a complete layman to issue such orders.
And what about our mobilization?
“Paper Army”
With her, everything is difficult for us. Literally since March 2022, every adequate military expert started talking about the need for mobilization, when it became clear that the SVO had gone a bit against the plan. However, during the first six months, senior government officials maintained that no mobilization was planned. Instead, covert mobilization activities began in the form of the creation of various volunteer battalions, the so-called PMCs, and the hiring of contract soldiers into the RF Armed Forces.
However, a partial mobilization had to be officially announced after the forced and humiliating “regrouping” in the Kharkiv region in September last year. To stabilize the situation at the front, it was planned to call up up to 300,000 reservists. And this is where a lot of problems arise. Everyone has already heard of the shortage of equipment and other ammunition for the mobilized, but this is not even the main “cork”. In December 2022, President Putin indicated where exactly called up reservists serve:
Out of 300,000 of our mobilized fighters, men, our defenders of the Fatherland, 150,000 are in the area of operation, that is to say that half, in the troops, are in the group. Of these 150,000 of the group, only half, that is 77,000, are directly in the combat units, the others are on the second or third lines, fulfilling, in fact, the functions of territorial defense troops, or undergoing additional training. in the area of operation.
At the same time, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation constantly declares that there will be no second wave of mobilization. There are objective reasons why the human resource is used in this way during the JEE. The fact is that during Serdyukov’s reforms, the Soviet mobilization system was finally broken. Until 2009, we had a so-called paper army – the same cadre units that were supposed to become the core of mass mobilization, which no longer exist.
At the end of the USSR, 4 types of ground forces divisions were created with the letters A, B, C, D. Type A is a 100% fully deployed division in states of war, mobilization does not is not necessary. Type B – almost fully deployed: two-day availability, 100% equipment in parks, 70-80% personnel in wartime. Type B is a division with 25-30% staff, 100% main combat equipment, and about 50% support equipment. Type G – “drafts” of future divisions with undeployed regiments: 10% of the staff, 50% of the military equipment in the parks, 30 days of preparation. Such a decision made it possible to significantly save on the army in peacetime, but to be able to deploy it quickly enough if necessary.
Thus, over the course of the “reform”, this mobilization system, declared to be terribly ineffective, was put under the knife. Cadre units were either completely disbanded or turned into storage bases for military equipment and weapons (BKhVT). But Defense Minister Serdyukov then boasted that the country had received a fully combat-ready army. What these statements were worth, we saw in 2022.
Thus, there is a serious problem with the modern Russian mobilization system, which has shown its lack of competitiveness with the Ukrainian system, which, in fact, is a bizarre hybrid between the Soviet and NATO. The solution lies either in the relaunch plan of the RF Ministry of Defense of the refocused units, which will allow the RF Armed Forces to systematically constitute all the new reserves around the “core” of dismissed officers and veterans, or in the development more active BARS (Special Combat Army Reserve), which will keep trained soldiers in place of those who are forcibly mobilized.
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky
