Eventually, though, the folks back home are going to start asking why those 5000 young Russians aren’t coming back. And eventually, they’re going to find out that they’re never coming back. And eventually, most of the populace will have lost a loved one that way, and it’s tough for propaganda to fight against that.
That’s the long game that Putin is facing.
Yes. I don’t think the folks back home would believe the old “they’ve gone to live a happy life on a farm somewhere” story.
“The more we de-Nazify Ukraine, the more empty the land is, so we are repopulating it with strong and loyal Russian youths! No you can’t go visit them.”
Alternative: “They’re being ‘resettled’ in the East Southwest. You’ll be getting a postcard sometime in the future.”
I don’ think that’s such a big issue for Putin.
There are 150 million Russians. That’s about 30 or 40 million families. There have been 50,000 casualties…That’s barely 1 percent of those families.
And the vast majority of those families are not residents of Moscow or the big cities, where Putin’s base live
So it is not likely “eventually most of the populace will have lost a loved one”.
Life goes on as usual for Moscow residents, and that’s why they continue to support Putin.
I just talked to a visitor from Moscow, and, while it was a short conversation and the subject of politics was not broached, she did mention in passing that the economy was not so great because of “the conflict”.
I have to agree, those 5000 Russians dying every month aren’t conscripts coming from some sort of semblance of a cross-section of Russian society. A heavily disproportionate number of them are from the most impoverished parts of Russia, where the salary being offered for signing a military contract is better monetarily than other options available to them. The only ones being conscripted and sent into the meatgrinder on the Russian side are from the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, where conscription of able-bodied males has allegedly been extremely extensive. The same people in who’s defense Putin justified launching this ‘special military operation.’
Regarding attitudes in Moscow, the channel 1420 on Youtube is a couple of kids in thier 20s who do street interviews, mostly in Moscow. They’ve been around since before the invasion of Ukraine, but most of their questions over the last seven months are related to the war in Ukraine in some manner. It’s not something I’d take for anything more than it is, after all it is just a couple of kids doing street interviews, but it does give an interesting look into attitudes in Moscow. Their latest video is “Russians react to losing the war.”
“Dear Babushka: Ukraine is so great, I’ve decided to spend the rest of my life here! Comrade President For Life Putin The Stabler Genius has even given me a small plot of land, for free!”
About 2m x 1m?
“Two paces long, by one pace wide, to be mine in perpetuity.”
Sidebar: “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” by Tolstoy - great short story.
That’s not far off from the total US casualties in Vietnam over ten years, and it’s happened in seven months.
Apparently, the two big trending search topics in Russia are how to get out of the country and how to perform self-harm to become unfit for service in the short term but will get better eventually.
I recognize that look! It’s the look of a guy who’s daydreaming about a disabling but non-crippling injury!
Time to offer to remove garbage for a friend. Just make sure the dump is closed.
Because of Thanksgiving?
Now this is, as we are seeing, going to be massively unpopular and is going to be getting a wide cross-section of the Russian population’s sons killed. Something that is really going to come back to bite the Russians in the ass if it was true is that during the so called ‘shadow mobilization’ when Russia was doing everything it could to make up for its losses without actually mobilizing, Russia was allegedly cannibalizing its training units for personnel and vehicles which gave a short-term boost to numbers at the long-term cost of sending the people whose job it is to train new and mobilized personnel off to die or get injured in Ukraine. If this is truly the case, now that mobilization has been called and those training units lack their trainers, it’s going to be a big problem. Perun, a Youtuber whose channel exploded from being a tiny gaming channel into a really good military commentary channel when he started doing well researched hour-ish long power point presentation style videos went into this issue three months ago in his video All metal, no manpower - Russian infantry shortages and mobilization in Ukraine. The relevant bit starts at about 29:12 in the video, Training Unit Cannibalization. As he notes, this is something the Germans and Japanese did during WW2, particularly the German Luftwaffe, and it really hurt them in the long run.
I’m not sure that this is the case, at least immediately. It seems that the initial targets of conscription are going to be those with recent military service, i.e. men who’ve been one-year conscripts in the recent past. This somewhat mitigates the difficulties of training them, though the conscript portion of the army apparently has atrocious training levels so guys who went through conscription 5 years ago might not actually be any more capable at soldiering than random guy off the streetcorner. However, my understanding is that Russia’s routine conscription does not target the demographics that are dangerous for Putin to alienate, so this wave of mobilization might not engender any significant or lasting protests. Some pissed off people in Yakutsk aren’t any danger to the regime.
I could be wrong about this, however. I’m certainly no expert on Russia.
CNN has a thorough analysis of the problems inherent in this conscription/mobilization initiative. Bottom line: A costly failure at turning the tide.
I’ve also just watched CNN video of the throngs trying to get out of Russia jamming the border crossings, to the point that Finland is about to close their borders to more Russian influx. A reporter noted that the highest Google hit in Russia right now is “How to break arm at home.”
Edit: Also noted that some of the anti-conscription protestors being arrested are being immediately inducted into the army. What could possibly go wrong?