Mobilization in Russia: Putin’s Flight Forward

WLadimir Putin spoke in front of the same brown wooden panels, national flags and beige telephones as in his speech at the start of the invasion of Ukraine, which was released before dawn on February 24. Large parts of his speech on Wednesday morning, which at a good 14 minutes was half the length of almost seven months ago, were known from earlier speeches, above all the accusations against the West that they had destroyed the Soviet Union and are now “dividing and ultimately destroying” Russia ” to want. Ukraine, said Putin, serves the West only as a vehicle for that goal. So the threat scenarios that Putin paints are the same. What is new are the consequences he draws from it.

At the end of February, a “special military operation” was supposed to remedy the situation: a mission of professional soldiers alongside “volunteers” and fighters from the two “people’s republics” proclaimed in Donbass in 2014. Putin hailed them as “true patriots” on Wednesday, amid reports of forcibly conscripted, poorly armed residents of the occupied regions of Luhansk and Donetsk being sent to the front lines. These forces are obviously no longer sufficient to hold the more than 1,000-kilometer-long front in Ukraine – Putin even mentioned this length twice, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu also invoked it in a state television interview also published on Wednesday morning. This is how Putin came to the crucial point: he thinks it is necessary to order a “partial mobilization” and has signed a corresponding decree that it should begin this Wednesday.

This is a break with the Kremlin’s previous line – and unprecedented in Russia’s recent history. The “special operation” has long been portrayed as part of a war waged by a “Kiev regime” against “the Donbass”; also as a defensive struggle in a war that a “collective West” is waging against Russia. So far, however, large parts of the Russian population have been able to ignore and suppress the depressing news from Ukraine, since the number of people fighting is limited and the “special operation” – which further should not be described as war – is going “according to plan”, according to the mantra the powerful. Putin himself, by stubbornly sticking to his usual routine of conferences and awards, had given the impression that he wanted to cling to the semblance of normalcy. His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said a week later that there was currently no talk of mobilization.

Is Putin losing his “sofa troops”?

The desire to continue to make the Russians believe that the “partial mobilization” affects only the fewest expressed also in Putin’s speech on Wednesday morning. “Only citizens who are currently in reserve will be called up for military service, primarily those who have served in the ranks of the armed forces and have certain military specializations and relevant experience,” he said. “Those who are called up for military service will definitely undergo additional military training before being deployed to their units, taking into account military special operation experience.” who receive payments and all the social guarantees of those who are conscripts.