Roving Periscope: Would Putin’s brinkmanship push Russia the USSR way?
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Napoleon and Hitler froze their big armies to death in the Russian winter; Japan found its nemesis in Manchuria and the USSR in Afghanistan. But they all lost these major wars in alien lands.
What distinguishes President Vladimir Putin is that, despite his long training as a Russian spymaster in the then USSR, and subsequent transition from the Communist ranks into geopolitics, he might discover his Waterloo in a land he is familiar with as a former Soviet Republic: Ukraine.
According to some reports, Russia may have lost up to 80,000 soldiers—dead or critically wounded and incapacitated—ever since it invaded Ukraine on February 24. Until last week, reports suggested, Putin was looking for an ‘honorable’ exit from the imbroglio while his soldiers retreated in several areas of war-battered Ukraine. Some reports showed his army might leave Ukraine after annexing the Russian-speaking eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk through manipulated referendums and selling these as war trophies back home.
But his sudden U-turn has panicked the Russians themselves, who fear Ukraine boomeranging on their own country and triggering its second dismemberment after 1991 when the Afghan misadventure bombed the Soviet Union.
His order for ‘partial mobilization’ may prove as counterproductive as his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine has now become. His attempts to push in another 300,000 able-bodied Russian men in the age group of 18-to-65 years in the war zone—he even debarred them from fleeing the country—is unlikely to win the war but drag it out further, military strategists say.
Russia is already plagued with insufficient human resources for rotation and many soldiers, now war-fatigued in their eighth month in the minefield, are worried about their fate in the biting winter starting next month. This disenchantment might spark another “October Revolution” as a replay of what happened in 1917 when the Communists overthrew the Tsarist regime.
According to the media reports on Friday, President Putin’s move to draft in 300,000 reservists to reinforce his troops in Ukraine might extend the war rather than influence its outcome. It could buy him some time to execute a wider strategy –including exacerbating Europe’s energy crisis and threatening a nuclear strike on unspecified targets—aimed at undermining foreign military and financial support for Kyiv’s counteroffensive effort.
Even if Russia rounds up these 300,000 able-bodied men, they cannot be drafted immediately, without adequate training, strategy, and resources, to fight in a now battle-hardened Ukraine fighting like a war machine. The Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are fighting for reclaiming their land and freedom; the unwilling, losing, and exhausted Russian soldiers are fighting for little returns.
“The 300,000 additional troops are not enough for Russia to make advances in Ukraine,” according to the media reports quoting Pavel Zolotarev, a retired Russian general who is now an analyst at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies in Moscow. “This is just enough to stop the Ukrainian offensive and cement control over territories that Russian forces control now.”
Mark Hertling, a former Commanding General of US Army Europe, pointed to limited Russian capacity and severe weaknesses in basic training methods he had seen on visits to the Russian military.
And what about the new draftees?
“The implications of this are that Russia can try to stem the deteriorating situation in their military and address the quantity aspect of the force,” an expert said, adding “but they can’t fix the quality because they have already used up their best equipment, their best officers, their best munitions and morale is going to be a perpetual one.”
