Putin’s war may unleash forces he’d prefer to remain contained.
A notable outcome of Ukraine’s surprise invasion of the Russian province of Kursk — now stretching into its third week — is the Russian army’s reliance on thousands of unprepared, under-equipped, and poorly led conscripts in its attempt to repel the invasion.
It’s often under-appreciated in the West just how unpopular and politically sensitive the draft is in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The use of conscripts in Afghanistan and Chechnya (and their deaths in their thousands) was a huge part of the unpopularity of those wars inside Russia. In those years, the draft set off protests and a Russian “mothers’ movement” that elicited concessions from the Kremlin.
And one of the big concessions that the Kremlin has made during its “special military operation” in Ukraine is that Russian conscripts — usually drafted for one-year terms — would not be used outside sovereign Russian territory, i.e., they wouldn’t be used in Ukraine. Instead, the war would only be fought by “contract soldiers,” volunteers who have signed on to fight, usually after being offered significant financial incentives from the Russian state, as well as large numbers of former convicts, offered their freedom should they survive the meat grinder.
Of course, the yawning maw of Putin’s two-and-a-half year-old war in Ukraine has been consuming young Russian men at the cyclic rate — which poses quite the problem. Indeed, the Kremlin’s promise to only use contract soldiers in Ukraine has always been a polite fiction. Many thousands of so-called contract soldiers fighting in Ukraine are “volunteers” only because they received an offer they couldn’t refuse. This is especially true of Russian ethnic minorities who have made up a disproportionate part of the Russian army’s ground combat troops. But, even so, due to Russia’s manpower needs, conscripts have still been finding their way to Ukraine’s battlefields and dying there.
The Kursk invasion has now brought this dynamic to the forefront. And it has a chance of causing real domestic political problems for the Kremlin.
Kursk’s border defenses — inasmuch as they existed at all — were manned largely by conscripts that had been kept out of the fighting in an effort to fulfill Putin’s promises. Many hundreds of them are now dead or in Ukrainian captivity.
Andrew E. Kramer, reporting for the New York Times from a prison in northern Ukraine, writes of how Russian “prisoners described being stationed at platoon strength, about 30 men, in concrete or earthwork fortifications spaced a mile or so apart along the border.”
There, they had faced a sudden, ferocious attack and quickly gave up the fight. . .
Pvt. Igor, a slender 21-year-old who was drafted in December, said Ukrainian artillery fire had picked up a few days before the incursion. “We reported to commanders, but they didn’t react,” he said. “They said, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’”
On the day of the attack, bombarded by artillery, he tried to hunker down in the fortification, but it caught fire.
He and others ran for a nearby forest, he said. From his group of 12 who had tried to dash to safety, five survived, he said.
And in a remarkable report, the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Luxmoore describes how, in the hours after the Ukrainian incursion, “footage soon emerged of dozens of Russian soldiers surrendering to Ukrainian forces, and Ukrainian media began publishing videos of the conscripts, many of them teenagers, being questioned on camera.”
The conscripts complained of being thrown into the fight without adequate arms or training and being left to fend for themselves when their superiors fled their border posts.
“We told our commanders, conscripts should not be at the border, get us out of here. They told us we must stay,” one 20-year-old conscript said. “They threw us to the dogs.”
These are exactly the kinds of stories that could turn an already uneasy Russian public fully against Putin’s revanchist dreams.
Indeed, according to Luxmoore, “Russia’s VK social network was full of posts from mothers searching for information about conscript sons who had gone missing since Aug. 6. A VK page dedicated to the search for missing soldiers, which has 59,000 subscribers, was receiving several posts a day.”
Obituaries of dead conscripts were also being published on local news sites across Russia, on the social-media profiles of the karate and boxing clubs they fought in and in local church pages. The young men confirmed dead or reported missing were described as teenagers who hadn’t had a chance to live life yet and weren’t ready for war.
Of course, this being Russia, where it’s almost tradition for the state to not give a damn about its dead young soldiers, one perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised when someone turns an already volatile situation up to eleven.
According to the Telegraph, Apti Alaudinov — a lieutenant of the brutal Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin ally — has been busy mocking the “sobs” of the mothers of Russian conscripts.
“If your 18-year-old children,” Alaudinov told Russian mothers, “who are servicemen, should not defend the homeland, even when it is attacked by the enemy and when the enemy is on our land, I have one question for you: why does this country need you and your children?”
Alaudinov added, “No one will die who is not destined to die. But if you die defending your homeland, your faith in God, you will go to heaven.”
Even in Russia, this kind of callousness is bound to cause heartburn in the Kremlin.