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As I'm sure many of you are already aware, it's been another insane 48 hours in Ukraine. The "side offensive" in the northeast that accompanied the "main offensive" in Kherson has made astonishing progress, with Ukrainian forces pushing all the way to the Oskil River, with Kupyansk under attack and Izyum and Lyman both threatened. None of this will mean much to most us, I realise, so here's a quick (already outdated) map of the progress.
It's important not to get carried away here; while this is the closest we've come to a true war of movement since April, and there are reports of desertions and surrenders by Russian forces, we're dealing with one front in a war with at least three more (roughly, in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk sectors). This will probably not trigger a general collapse of Russian forces. Moreover, it is still possible that Ukrainian forces will find themselves overextended and vulnerable to counterattacks. However, as matters stand, this looks like a decisive operational-level victory for Ukraine.
My main uncertainty in what follows is what Russia's response to this apparent defeat will be, given that the underlying tides seem to favour Ukraine. Mass mobilisation may have helped a few months back, but - in addition to its political difficulties - it's unclear whether this late into the war it will be sufficient to turn the tide. Obviously there's always the option of nuclear escalation, but this would be a colossal gamble for Russia, potentially leaving them diplomatically isolated while providing limited relief on the battlefield. Another possibility would be for Russia explicitly to use the Zaporizhzhia plant as a hostage, but again it's unclear how that would translate into gains on the battlefield. And all the while, Russia's gas blackmail strategy seems to be floundering; not only have European reserves filled at faster than expected rates, European gas futures continued to fall, suggesting optimism about long-term supply issues.
Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin. His successor might still be able to cut a deal with the West that allows them de facto control of Crimea (for example, via a Hong Kong-style lease agreement, accompanied by a clever financial 'reparations package' that involves minimal pain on all sides). That will not begin to ameliorate the damage this idiotic war has caused to Russia and Ukraine, but at this point it is the least bad option. The only question now is how Russia can best ensure a relatively fast recovery from the self-inflicted harm it has created.
It still would, if Russia would do it. Everything points to this war becoming a grinding battle of attrition, so a few weeks or months of time horizon isn't super long. It's my opinion that Russia deciding to mobilize would be a game-changer; not enough to win instantly by any means, but more than enough to tip the strategic initiative back towards Russia in the medium term. Hopefully Russia just refuses to do that and sticks to its inadequate "shadow mobilization" that they've been using so far, but the Kharkov offensive has been really good evidence of why Russia should mobilize more broadly.
It all depends on whether Russia has the logistics pipeline in place to train, arm, and deploy hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. It's entirely possible it doesn't, which would explain why Putin has been reluctant to take this option. As for economic mobilisation, it's critical to realise that the Russian government - despite its autocratic guise - has very limited state capacity. It's a long way from e.g. the US or Japan in 1941, where large-scale changes in industrial production could be accomplished quickly and efficiently via governmental fiat.
Of course, there are also the political factors. Quite apart from the direct political unpalatability of mobilisation, there's the risk that doing it now - so late in the day, and in response to military setbacks - signals weakness, which could cause any potential siloviki hyenas to pounce.
Soldiers are not the biggest problem, armor, weaponry and comms are. Training 10 or 20 new divisions armed with AKs is totally possible, producing enough tanks, IFVs, SPA, ATGMs, radios, counterbattery radars, UAVs is. Even the relatively slow trickle of arms Ukraine's getting is hard to match when your arms industry is 25% sinecure, 25% grift and 25% vanity projects.
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Russian logistics were strained when they tried to rush Kiev at the beginning of the war, and they're presumably strained west of the Dnieper due to bridges having holes in them, but other than that the Russian logistics system seems to hold up reasonably well. It did well enough to transport thousands of artillery shells per day to pound the Ukrainians before HIMARS showed up and blunted their effectiveness. Furthermore, most of the analysis I've seen has said that Russia still has an equipment advantage while Ukraine has a manpower advantage. Russia needs bodies to plug holes like what happened at Kharkov, and to fill out their mechanized divisions (which was how it was supposed to work in the first place).
The fact that the Russians had to transport thousands of artillery shells a day for rolling artillery bombardment offenses is kind of the point of why a mobilization wouldn't really help much: the precondition for the already poor effectiveness in the Donbas was the artillery saturation in a salient where the Ukrainians couldn't risk their high-value artillery or air defense assets due to the nature of the salient, not local numbers of forces, which already favored the Russians. A general mobilization wouldn't have helped the Donbas offensive, even as forces unsupported by artillery/airpower wouldn't have been able to continue offenses elsewhere. Being unable to support too many invasion corridors is the entire reason the Russians withdrew from the Kiev axis, rather than dig in and play attrition there.
While having having more forces along the line might have allowed a stronger static defense against, say, the Kharkiv offensive, which appears to have been more opportunistic, the Russian mobilization of bodies wouldn't correspond with a mobilization of more artillery systems, as the artillery is already mobilized, and was already committed/concentrated. The same goes for the armor and airpower as well- the material advantages have already been mobilized, and in many respect squandered, as Western aid has in several respects flipped the quality advantage. Mobilizing armor divisions with no armor is just light infantry, and light infantry is what is best countered by the sort of systems that are bessed countered by the precision munition capabilities Russia no longer has.
A lot of this is because equipment is a force multiplier, but only when it enables and is enabled by other assets, and the Russian quality equipment that might have made a big difference with a mobilized manpower base earlier in the war is already gone, either expended early or attrited in the half-year since. It's not like there are warehouses of uncommitted precision munitions waiting for a general mobilization- the ones not reserved for NATO contingencies were largely used in the first month, most of what was left was again used in the second wave in the failed encirclement plans, and what's left is no longer obviously superior or more prevalent than Ukrainian material. It's not like a general mobilization is going to bring back the nearly 14 Armored Brigades worth of equipment already lost either. The Russians have already been trying to mobilize/refit/resurrect their machine stockpiles as well, just to plug the current gaps. More bodies wouldn't be helping the offense, just the defense.
To which you might go 'that's the point,' to prevent the success of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, to which the Russian national-level strategist would be justified in asking 'what's the point of that point?' The results of the war doesn't depend on the Ukrainian counter-offensive, it depends on cutting off the European supply routes to Ukraine, and it has since about March of this year.
The Russian strategic gamble has been that they can break Western support for Ukraine, turning the conflict into one where Russian economic advantages vis-a-vis Ukraine matter. If this gamble succeeds, the Ukrainian offensive is irrelevant- it can just be rolled back later when Ukraine faces economic collapse without western aid, and western abandonment allows Russia it's free hand. If this gamble fails, the Ukraine counter-offensive is also irrelevant in that the Russian position was fundamentally doomed, as a 'victory' still relies on a conclusive end to the war, which the Ukrainians won't provide if they're still getting support.
At which point, at the national level, what is a general mobilization supposed to do that helps more than it hurts? It's not free manpower.
Economically, a general mobilization will further economic damages and pains, both taking current taxpayers out of the economy where they're doing necessary economic work to support the government's efforts to endure sanctions, and accelerating the ongoing demographic exodus as people currently apathetic about the war start looking for ways to avoid the draft. Politically, mass mobilization means that casualties go far beyond the current portion of the population that at least, in some sense, 'volunteered for it' and 'accepted the risks.' A core part of Putin's political power base is that people don't blame the Russian government for costs of the war- this often changes when the government forces family members to fight and die. Diplomatically, mass-mobilization also caries costs and risks: yes, the West can further escalate support, not just in equipment that is currently not being provided, including systems and capabilities that can range into Russia, but also in manpower. Russia is not the only country that can hire mercenaries, and if the issue of Ukrainian weakness actually becomes a manpower issue, there are sources available. There's literally millions of people trying to get into Europe, and the French Foreign Legion is more than a precedent, it has a Ukrainian counterpart.
If Russia is going to win, it's not going to hinge on the ability to defend and beat Ukrainian counter-offensives until they give up and stop fighting. The Ukrainians will just continue to accept western drones and precision munitions and keep blowing up Russian forces and material at range, and a Russian mobilization just raises the costs associated with it. Russian victory requires a political settlement, and breaking the will of the Western supporters as a prerequisite, and a general Russian mobilization is not going to make NATO's eastern front reduce supply lines through Poland to Ukrainian.
Russian mobilization wouldn't do much in the short term and it'd do more damage economically and politically in the long term, but in the medium term it's still Russia's best option. The Russian army isn't a spent force by any means. Just look at their defense of Kherson, which has made the Ukrainians bleed severely without much to show for it.. Diplomatically, mobilization would up the ante and force the West to send even more money and weapons if they want to keep Ukraine in the fight. That's the best chance for Russia to break Western unity especially as gas shortages come to the fore in the winter.
I'm not saying any of this is guaranteed to happen nor would a mobilization guarantee Russia to "win" in any sense, but it's really their only option to stabilize things without using nukes. The Kharkov push has been a sizeable morale + propaganda win for Ukraine and has signaled to the West that the war can be won beyond a Korea-style stalemate, so there's no reason to stop supporting Ukraine. Russia needs to prevent things like this from happening again if it wants to achieve any of its objectives including breaking Western unity, otherwise it's going to just lose conventionally sometime in 2023 unless Ukraine makes a massive blunder somewhere.
What the Ukrainians have to show for it is not only Kharkiv, where the Russians have lost in days what took them months to conquer when they had their best gear rather than losing it in retreat, but the fact that the Russians in Kherson are in an untenable position of being supplied across a river whose bridges are in artillery range. They can't build up for a breakout, they can't retreat, they're stuck and in an awful position prone to attrition. The Ukrainians don't need to 'show anything' to be winning the Kherson exchange, even setting aside a lack of reliable data to indicate they are 'bleeding severely.'
The West is already sending the Ukrainians money and weapons surpassing the annual Russian budget, and unlike the Russian budget it's been far more tailored to the war in Ukraine. Western aid isn't required to keep Ukraine in the fight anymore- they'll keep fighting regardless. Western aid is required to keep Ukraine on the offensive, but a stalemate doesn't imply a Ukrainian surrender.
If Western unity breaks, it doesn't mean that the West stops supplying Ukraine for that, because the West hasn't been united in degrees of support to Ukraine in the first place. 'Western unity' is, and has been, a mirage of different western countries doing different sorts of support. The decisive sorts of support for military resiliance haven't been coming from the countries who will be most affected, and thanks to Russian gas strategy a change of government doesn't re-open the gas network because the gas has to go through... Ukraine.
It'll still lose conventionally if it does a general mobilization, just sometime in later 2024, because they don't have the hardware superiority anymore to support infantry maneuver. Advance in areas of extremely favorable numbers and allocation of forces already required a concentration of artillery, armor, and airpower that won't be available to support the mobilized forces, because the hardware isn't going to be generated by mobilizing. The Russians need to win conventionally for a military mobilization to matter.
Nor would nukes stabilize the situation, because the situation is not constrained to Ukraine. A nuclear ultimatum for capitulation to surrender and national subjugation on nuclear grounds is incredibly destabilizing for regional nuclear proliferation, and that is far more dangerous to Russia than actually losing the war in Ukraine.
Source?
(1) says Ru govt spending was $313.96bn in 2021. Not sure about that data, so here’s bloomberg on monthly revenues from 2021: taking 1.8t rubles as a median ~ $24bn (with $1=75rubles). $24bn x 12 = $288bn per year.
Also EU paid $90bn to Russia for fossil fuels since the beginning of war.
I don’t know how much weapons, training services, etc cost, but it doesn’t seem to add up.
How so? I mean, Ukr soldiers don't have many job options anyway, but delayed or devalued wages would degrade performance by increasing marauding and other "part time" activities. If Ukraine receives cheap supplies/loans, then prices would rise at least somewhere (Europe, Ukraine or both). Ukraine inflation is around 23%. EU has 9.1%. For how long is that pressure sustainable? Ru bathes in commodity surpluses, for now, and I guess it has higher capacity to print money, if needed (although industrial output doesn't scale with the speed of printing press, of course).
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Before the Korean War went stalemate, it first involved the Northerners almost pushing the Southerners into the sea, and then the Southern-American alliance almost pushing the Northerners into China, for China to finally basically push the allied forces back to the initial alliance. We're still on track for a replay in a way; now we just need the Russians to do some daring flanking operation and take most of the country, only to be ambushed by unexpected NATO alpine troops at night just as final victory seems within reach while lost in some godforsaken wintery mountain valley near the far border of Ukraine, like, say, in the Carpathians.
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