If Russia does not declare war and mobilize right now then Putin should hand his chair over to Zelensky because that's what he is demanding.
I really wish people would just stop and think before they keep making this tired old argument. As if it was that easy or cost free and all Putin had to do was snap his fingers and millions of fully trained and equip soldiers would magically appear overnight.
I think that the main reason Putin hasn’t fully mobilised yet is because that’s not a viable option. And not just because of the political and economic costs, but also military.
Currently, it’s the professional Russian army engaged in Ukraine. Obviously they did not deploy the whole army, but what has been deployed is probably close to what they can maintain in a sustained manner. They can surge troops every now and again, which may be what they are doing now, but that’s only viable short term.
For Russia to have significantly more combat troops is to deploy their conscripts. Sure that will add a few hundred thousand extra warm bodies, but I have serious reservations about just how combat effective Russian conscripts are. I think they may not even be at the same level as the DNR militias since the DNR seems to be getting a lot of decent hardware and have seen a lot of fighting in the last few years. Russian conscripts may only be at 2014 Ukraine army standards, and we all saw how useful that caliber of troops are
So, mobilisation and declaring war isn’t actually likely to change things up on the ground in Ukraine for the Russians all that much, at least not in the short term and probably not in the ways they want.
They are going to move from a situation where they have too few soldiers to a situation where they have too few good soldiers, who on top of fighting the enemy, now may also need to babysits FNG conscripts. The kind of low cost (in lives) tactical retreat we just seen may not even be possible with a large number of green conscripts scattered all over the place getting underfoot.
Unlike the US in Vietnam, Russian conscripts won’t have the luxury of having air dominance and CAS all the time to bail them out, when they fuck up, they are liable to suffer serious casualties. It’s the Russian ground forces that are doing all the heavy lifting in this war so far, and the demands on them and the fighting skill of their troops may surprise many who sneer. Especially when you consider they are overwhelmingly using dumb rounds instead of PGMs.
Ironically, the recent twin Ukrainian offensives offers up very effective illustrations on the effectiveness and value of conscripts vs professional military. How well did Ukrainian conscripts fair? Was it worth it to even deploy them other than to act as extremely expensive human decoys and bullet sponges to prepare the field for the professional soldiers elsewhere?
But one thing for sure will happen if they deploy conscripts, Russian combat casualties will jump up, and their K/D rations will plummet. Worse for Putin is that more body bags will return home to Russian families instead of Eastern Ukrainian ones.
The root of Russia’s current battlefield woes is still the same as from the start of the war - corruption, mismanagement and penny pinching in their military modernisation. Declaring war and throwing in the conscripts solves none of those problems.
Too much of their military modernisation was done for show and on the cheap. Too much spent on fancy planes and mighty ships and too little on less sexy but more practical and important stuff like PGMs, SEAD jamming pods, targeting pods, UAVs, comms, night vision, thermal and above all - training. They also cut their professional military numbers by too much, and conscripts are just not up to scratch to be worth the costs of deploying them.
