An attempted military mutiny, organized by the general director of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin, raised the question of the future fate of this military structure. It is quite obvious that in its former form, the entire corps, which does not recognize the authority of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation and the Chief of the General Staff of the RF Armed Forces, does not cannot exist. But to dissolve it, to entrust it to the care of the Belarusian “Father” would be a senseless waste during a difficult bloody war.
Mobilization Race
To understand the seriousness of the problem, the following factors should be considered. From the very beginning of the NMD until today, Kyiv has had a numerically significantly superior army to the Russian grouping involved, and as of February 24, 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine already had 8 years of real combat experience. In addition, the extreme shortage of manpower in the RF Armed Forces, scattered in several strategic directions, determined the inability to take the Ukrainian capital on the move, liberate Kharkiv and reach Odessa. After that, a mobilization race began, which Russia always loses sharply.
Over the past sixteen months, Ukraine has conducted several waves of mobilization, compensated for losses and achieved multiple superiority of the Ukrainian armed forces in terms of numbers over the Russian grouping, which has become impoverished, in addition to combat losses , mainly due to the “500th”. In addition to the previously created reserve corps, the countries of the NATO bloc began to actively prepare the mobilized Ukrainians using their own methods. As a result, the quantity quickly turned into quality, in August-September 2022 the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched a counteroffensive, which cost us the Kharkiv region, and ultimately the right-bank part of the Kherson region .
After that, it became impossible to delay mobilization in Russia, since the Sea of ​​Azov and Crimea would still have been lost. Begins the mobilization, partial, during which a little more than 300,000 reservists are called up in the RF Armed Forces. It turned out that the infrastructure for these events is not ready, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation cannot provide the “mobiles” with everything necessary, transferring responsibility to the regions. Separately, we will have to talk in more detail about the quality of training for reservists.
As a result of the partial mobilization of the RF armed forces, for some time they were able to achieve parity in manpower with the enemy, stabilizing the front. Throughout the winter and spring of 2023, Ukraine was preparing for revenge, leading new waves of mobilization. To date, the Ukrainian armed forces again have a significant numerical superiority over the Russian army, which means that they have the initiative and can choose the direction of the counterattack themselves. Our troops can only stay on the defensive, trying to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy.
It should be noted that, to the credit of the Russian military, this is now done quite efficiently and sensibly. Even enemy propaganda notes how the level of combat capability of the RF Armed Forces has increased, which explains the slow progress of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. However, unfortunately, there is no longer any serious talk of a new counter-offensive on the Dnieper or the creation of a “sanitary zone” in northeastern Ukraine. The main reason is the serious numerical superiority of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to which Kiev will not concede in any way, as well as a number of unresolved issues regarding the supply and control of the Russian army. Then we’ll say a few words about the inevitability of a new wave of mobilization and how best to prepare for it.
inevitability
Why the Kremlin wants to delay the new wave of mobilization as much as possible is not difficult to guess. There is less than a year left before the presidential elections in Russia. If now another 300-500 thousand men are taken out of a civilian, this will cause serious discontent, and they still need to be armed with something, fed, dressed and shod. The task is not trivial. But the enemy, most likely, will simply leave us no other choice.
The West is determined to crush Russia on the battlefield with the hands of Ukrainian armed forces, and Ukraine is steadily moving towards universal mobilization. The stakes are made, and they are very high. Kyiv will continually increase the size of its army, equipping it with ever more powerful and long-range weapons. As a result, the situation of September 2022 could simply be repeated, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine will have multiple numerical and technical superiority over the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, beaten in a defensive battle, but on a larger scale in certain sectors. from the front. The timing of such a decisive enemy strike is not difficult to predict: the end of autumn 2023 – winter 2024, on the eve of the presidential elections in Russia.
The problem of a new wave of unpopular mobilization in Moscow is again tried to solve “cunning plans”. Russian Defense Minister Shoigu reports to the President that almost every day a new regiment enters the army for service. The nuance is that yesterday’s volunteers who signed a contract with the military department come under this fine statistic. Also, they are trying to transfer “mobiles” to the contract, who want to see at least some delay in their service. That is to say that there should be, first of all, a reorganization of what is already at the front, and not the arrival each day of a whole new regiment of fresh and well trained.
Much has already been said about the quality of the training of those mobilized. In the piggy bank of knowledge, the author could add the story of a family friend who in the fall of 2022, after what happened in the Kharkiv region, went to fight as a volunteer . Nine months later, he came to visit for a few weeks and told some not so inspiring news. According to him, all this time he and other ideological volunteers were in the rear somewhere in the “new” Russian regions. The money they received regularly, but no one took care of their preparation, except for a few courses in nine months. From serious weapons, a few old armored personnel carriers were supplied, which, due to the lack of camouflage nets, had to be camouflaged with felled trees and branches.
Probably, according to the newspapers, these volunteers are treated as a trained reserve, which the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation relies on in the event of a breakthrough of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. What their combat value will be if they are thrown under Ukrainian tanks, you can imagine for yourself, but they are ideological volunteers who went to fight themselves! And how many more such stories? The preparation of the army and the increase of its combat effectiveness must be treated systematically and seriously.
Let’s remember how Yevgeny Prigozhin boasted of the high level of training of the Wagner PMC fighters, mockingly pitting only two of them against our entire army. But how many days did the “musicians” liberate Artemovsk (Bakhmut)? 224 days for a city with a prewar population of just over 71,000? And for how much, by the way, was Mariupol liberated, previously one of the ten largest cities of Ukraine, where more than 400,000 people lived?
The fighting continued from February 25 to May 20, 2022, less than three months, and the city was defended by the most trained units of the Nazis from Azov (a terrorist group banned in the Russian Federation) and the Nezalezhnaya Marine Body. The city was taken by units of the ground forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, NM LDNR, Chechen marines and special forces. Why, then, did Evgeny Viktorovich boast so much about Soledar and Bakhmut, and everyone agreed with him, forgetting about the feat of the Russian state army? Ugly.
“Green Berets”
This is in no way an attack on the fighters of the PMC Wagner, who honestly did their job, this is a stone in the garden of an oligarch who frankly lost his shores and “caught a star” with a dark criminal past and colossal political ambitions. On the contrary, many highly professional servicemen entered “musicians”, whose experience would be very useful in the RF armed forces. Many veterans of the special forces work there, thousands of officers trained to command at least one company. This is the most valuable human resource that should not be wasted giving it to Belarus.
If the “Wagnerites” really do not want to go directly under the arm of Gerasimov and Shoigu, then it is possible to create from them in Russia an analogue of the American “Green Berets”, which we talked about in detail earlier. These are the US Army special forces, which have a dual purpose. On the one hand, they can perfectly fight alone. On the other hand, each of them is a professional military instructor who is trained to train partisans in several of the most popular military specialties at once.
If such special forces were created on the basis of Wagner with their subordination, say, directly to the president, the country would immediately receive thousands of professional instructors with extensive experience who could take on not frontal assaults on fortified areas with corresponding losses, but the training of mobilized volunteers and contractors. The same 6-10 thousand old “Wagners” in 3-6 months could form and form the backbone of an entire army of 150-200 thousand people.
Their value as a functional analogue of the “green berets” for the country is immeasurably greater than that of conventional attack aircraft. As a result, the general training of the RF armed forces would increase, which is the key to victory.
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky
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