Russia’s Conscripts
Budte vse, kem vy mozhete byt!
Pentagon spox report Russia’s invasion forces are in a defensive war against a determined Ukrainian military that continues to make advances along the entire front, from Kherson in the south to Kharkiv in the north.
Ukrainian forces are slowly but surely liberating town after town along their twin axes of advance, including Kupyansk, home of one of the country’s largest rail stations. From the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense:
The village of Kupyansk-Vuzlovy in the Kharkiv region is liberated.
One of the largest railway stations in the east of Ukraine is located there. The occupiers used it in their supply route.
The offensive in the Kharkiv region continues.
Russian troops conscripted through Vlad’s recent mobilization efforts are just now arriving on the frontlines to join the faltering invasion.
Poetrooper instigated this one.
Russian conscripts with no training are already on the frontlines in Ukraine, Kyiv says, as MoD warns they are likely to suffer heavy casualties
- Russian conscripts are already on the frontlines in Ukraine, Kyiv’s generals say
- Mobilised civilians are replacing dead soldiers with no training, they added
- Putin gave an order allowing military to start conscripting soldiers last week
- British intelligence says draftees are likely to be deployed with ‘minimal preparation’ and will ‘suffer a high attrition rate’
Drafted civilians are being used to plug holes in Russian units that have been mauled in more-than seven months of fighting, the Ukrainian general staff said, which will badly affect their morale, ‘psychological state’ and combat performance.
Meanwhile British intelligence said none of the tens of thousands of conscripts called up so far are likely to receive good training, as most of Russia’s instructors have been sent away to fight.
It comes as Ukraine continues to press its advance in the eastern Donbas region, with footage showing a massive artillery barrage on the town of Zelena Dolyna.
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Vladimir Putin last week gave the order to begin conscripting men into the Russian military after his army suffered heavy casualties in the war.
Kyiv says some 57,000 Russian troops have died fighting in the war so far, while Western intelligence puts that figure lower – up to 25,000 dead and 60,000 wounded, according to an August estimate.
Russia claims to have lost around 6,000 men, but has officially called up 300,000 reservists – giving proof to the lie. Some reports have suggested the actual number being called up could be in excess of 1million.
Russians have been fleeing the country en masse since Putin’s call-up. Flights out of the country have been sold out for days, and long lines of Russians have waited on foot or in cars to leave the country. European countries found themselves divided on the issue of accepting people as refugees. Latvia’s Foreign Minister opined:
“Many of Russians who now flee Russia because of mobilisation were fine with killing Ukrainians, they did not protest then. It is not right to consider them as conscientious objectors. There are considerable security risks admitting them…”
Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau questioned the effectiveness of Russian conscripts against a seasoned Ukrainian military, especially given the lackluster tactical performance of regular, presumably trained Russian troops earlier in the war.
“It’s not a very promising move from the military point of view,” Rau said on September 27 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, D.C. “I’m not a military analyst, but following common sense, it doesn’t seem a very good solution because if the Ukrainians managed to defeat well-trained and well-equipped Russian soldiers, what’s the chance that those that are worse … are going to prevail? I suppose it’s rather unreasonable to expect a breakthrough as the result of a mobilization.”
After this fails Putin will be backed further into his corner. He’s already rattling the nuclear saber, so now would be a great time to discuss Ukraine’s entry into NATO.
/sarc
Thanks, Poe.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Big Pentagon, Guest Link, International Affairs, Russia, Ukraine
So, if even more of these untrained/under-trained Russians die, Putin will be faced with extreme escalation or a coup.
I’m hoping that someone will teach him, first hand, the meaning of defenestration – from the 50th floor…
I’m afraid he may feel the push to go to extremes….
They way things are going, Vlad will either suffer an “accidental” fall from a tall building or Kiev will eat a tactical nuke.
Time to hit the Russians hard and destroy their already fragile morale. I could see their lines breaking under a “shock and awe” attack.
How come poopen doesn’t lead by example and show the conscripts how to fight.
As a KGB thug, he’s about as skilled at war as a Dirlewanger brigade trooper– great at inflicting torture, running away and shooting unarmed people.
So much for national pride. Root for the home team while safely sitting in the bull pen. Now Putin is calling for the relief and no one wants to answer.
You clowns wanted this war and now you have one. Time to suit up.
Did Vladimir Putin at least give these recently conscripted troops the opportunity to make an allotment out to the stripper they met on Liberty?
Only the best!
I’d take Bubbles over Ricky any day of the week.
Ol’ Poe’s number one takeaway from this Ukraine War is that our intelligence services are either grossly inept, or they are thoroughly corrupt and have been deliberately deceiving the American public for decades about the capabilities of the Russian military, so as to keep their generous funding flowing and their effectiveness unchallenged.
As those suspicions are not mutually exclusive, it is probably a combination of the two, as seems to be the case with so many other federal agencies. It seems our Founding Fathers were prescient in their distrust of a strong central government… 🤔
I did a Warfighter last year and I came away a bit concerned with Russian capabilities. Then this Ukrainian operation took place and it laid bare the poor state of training, logistics, and maintenance among Russian forces. It rapidly became apparent that not only is their conscript army poorly trained, but their leadership is also poorly trained. They didn’t follow their own doctrine at the outset and throughout the campaign because they didn’t train on it.
I’ll take all of the above for $1000.00, Alex. Used to, quantity had a quality of it’s own, but I do believe them days are over. I was gonna ask if anybody with recent service had done some recent studies of Ivan’s capabilities, but I see that Pappy, The Stranger, answered my question as I was typing. So much for the vaunted bear of the north, huh.
Still wondering tho, if Ivan was sending his Class C Formations in the beginning and holding his sho ’nuff troops in Reserve…or using them to keep an eye on The Northern Resourse Area in case the ChiComs get frisky.
Class C formations wouldn’t have had T-90 tanks. I don’t think the Russians have much left of the good stuff. There were pictures of T-62 series tanks being taken out of mothballs, put on flat cars, and sent to Ukraine. The Russkies are good about that…they NEVER throw anything away. There were rumors that they still have T-34/85’s in storage. It was mentioned in one of Clancy’s later novels, so I wouldn’t doubt it.
Thanks, Pappy. It’s kinda hard to make sense out of the whole thing because we’re not seeing any real intel on what’s happening. And what little I can glean, how much of it is true or just propoganda from either/or/both/all sides? As I stated in the beginning of this sh^t, I don’t have a dog in that fight and my sympathies were with the cannon fodder, on both sides, that were being caught up in a political power play meat grinder. I also saw the beginnings of WWIII in the makings.
Odd that we have people in our grubermint that are known to have colluded with the Ruskies AND The ‘Kraines. I quit trusting the Federales when the Warren Report FIRST (ht2..oh..wait that would be moi) came out.
I hear ya.
Ukraine built the T-64, got lots of Soviet ones and kept making upgrades. Modernized T-64s and Javelins vs. recently de-mothballed T-62s or even T-54/55s aught to be fun.
The Croats and the Serbs used T-34/85 tanks against each other during the Croat-Bosniak War in Bosnia and Herzegovina from October 1992 to February 1994.
Without any Anti Armor Capability Pretty much any Standard Infantry Company of ANY Army in the World would get Chewed up by even a WW2 Tank with infantry support,, Machine Guns, 60 MM Mortars, Regular Grenades, rifles and pistols would just bounce off it.
I’d suggest that they are too busy targeting Americans in unconstitutional deep state bullshit to actually do their jobs and keep an eye on our foreign enemies…
There is that…
When Iraq was laid low in the PGW, the argument was that they lost because the Iraqis couldn’t or wouldn’t fight. The truth is they never had a chance. Western tech, training and leadership has always been superior to the Russians.
I see mass surrenders among these new troops. Seriously, why would you fight in this situation? I saw a video recently that showed a female Russian army medic telling these new conscripts that they would need to provide their own sleeping bags, tents, cold weather gear, and first aid kits because the army had none to issue. Also told them to have their women (wives, girlfriends, mothers) send them sanitary napkins and tampons since there wasn’t enough gauze in the inventory so they would be using these feminine products to perform self aid and buddy care in the event they got shot. Now, the video could have been produced by Ukraine for propaganda purposes, but it rings true.
There are also numerous YouTube vids with young and old Russian conscripts revealing their total lack of meaningful training.
Of course, that could be Uke propaganda, but how does it help their appeals for arms to show that their opposition is a bunch of terrified, untrained kids and beyond-their-prime old farts?
Since the start of this thing, Poe has been thinking, like KoB, that the Russians must be keeping many of their first-line forces on the border with China, the only country that has both a demonstrated motive and the probable means to pose an actual threat to all those enticing natural riches out there in Siberia.
And lastly, Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling may have as much to do with cautioning that hungry Red Dragon as it does NATO… 🤔
They are. They have to. In WWII when they emptied the East and sent everything and everyone to their Western Front to fight the Germans there was no threat in the East.
After their massive ass kicking if they tried that today the Chinese might invade just because they think they might get away with it. Of course they are also wary of the US, since we have invaded a dozen countries in the last 3 decades…
The reality is most armies lose the war when they take 10% or more casualties…. unless that army is Russian.
That is a really good point.
Meanwhile:
Putin sends bombers to base w/ nukes out of reach of Ukraine.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1676885/russia-news-putin-sends-bombers-olenya-airbase-world-war-3-ukraine
NATO issues “unwavering support for Ukraine” as Ukraine applies to join NATO and Russia declares parts of Ukraine (even territory it doesn’t control any longer) to be Russian.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/6340675/nato-issues-nuclear-war-warning-vladimir-putin/
Folk in DC ain’t happy about Russia using tactical nukes in Ukraine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/world/europe/washington-putin-nuclear-threats.html
Russky defebse minister talks tough:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-its-troops-left-lyman-avoid-encirclement-2022-10-01/
Russkies continue tp lose ground in Ukraine:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-latest-russia-says-annexed-163128625.html
Watch this and you’ll be better prepared for nuclear conflict than most Russky troops:
Admittedly the Ukrainians are gaining ground right now. But…
-The conscripts (draftees) are previous members of the Russian services and from their National and not dissimilar to our National Guard. They have training. So don’t get your hopes up too much right now.
-As noted in the article, if Russia is mobilizing 1 million, the Ukraine is in trouble.
-The two sources cited are the Daily Mail (fed by MI6) and the UK intelligence. Both have been notoriously wrong since the war started, so I recommend taking them with a large grain of salt.
-My favorite part of this article is the “Russians are fleeing en masse” paragraphs. I remember Vietnam only too well and the exodus to Canada of war protestors. Ever since (centuries) governments have been forcing men into war, there have been those who head for the hills; whether smart or cowards I leave to you to answer. Incidentally, the Russians have had a conscientious objector status on the books, similar to our draft CO status,
Their “reserves” are nothing like ours, unless you count the IRR. A one or two year prior service conscript who has been out of the military with no follow on training for 10 plus years is useless. I take some of these videos out there with a lump of salt, but if their currently serving troops have done what can only be seen as a piss poor job so far, these newly mobilized troops can only do worse.
Nonsense– if Russkies can drink, they can got into combat! (Worked in World War II… Germans only killed them at a 4:1 exchange ratio, that’s all.)
Stranger: Thanks. I’m still getting educated on each side’s training. It makes a difference in analyzing things. Any idea on how much training the Ukrainian conscripts get? I tend to project that each side’s conscripts get what I got.
For Nam, I had a whopping 30 days in the States and 10 days in-country. The in-country was good and intense; I was told to forget the State-side training when doing the in-country training. It took about four patrols to feel like I knew something.
Canada never closed it’s border to the US due to a massive influx of those fleeing their government service. It is estimated that over 10 years 20-30K fled the US to Canada. Finland saw similar numbers last week alone, and that was just Finland.
Russians will be arrested for protesting and other forms of draft resistance that were popular in the Vietnam Era. If they get arrested they don’t go to a nice comfy prison, they go to the front. They have no choice but to flee.
So far as CO status, I have no idea where you get that fantasy from. Could you perhaps cite a source?
https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/eur460051997en.pdf
The Guardian has many BOG and they are a slightly better news source. They covered the wars there before in 1917 and 1945.
Massive onflux? 2-3,000 a YEAR? Border patrol deals with that many DAILY in some sectors.
20,000 last week in Finland. When you take into account that the US border is 2.5X longer this works out to numbers even larger than those swarming our Southern border.
Putin has failed on the absolutely key item. He has utterly failed to convince the Ukranians they cannot win, thus failed to persuade them to quit. He burned his available forces to the stub, and now is trying a “boundless manpower” gambit that hasn’t been valid since the 1990s (if even then). Nukes are now his only real deterrent. And if they are as iffy as the vehicles were…
If China doesn’t exploit this in Siberia, they -cant-. Those two have fought epic battles over the Siberia border arrangement, when China had way less nuclear capability and Russia had massively more conventional forces.
Thus major implications for the stability of both. If not invincible, who might decide time to exploit….
There is no real reason to accept Ukraine into NATO. Trying to use them as a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe is a very soviet way of thinking.
To join NATO requires the unanimous agreement of all partners. This still seems unlikely. While France appears to be in favor now, Germany and Hungary will likely continue to oppose.
Hungary likely would like to see territory lost in WWII returned to it or some kind of ethnic protections for the millions of ethnic Hungarians living in what is now considered the Ukraine.
Germany OTOH will likely continue to oppose it due to the instability and the chance of being drawn into a war which would be catastrophic to all of Europe. If Merkel were still in charge there wouldn’t be much discussion about it.
Germany was well aware of the pending invasion and refused to even table the Ukraine joining NATO right before the war kicked off. This sealed Putin’s decision on the invasion. There is no reason to think that now that the war has commenced and continues to build that they want to jump into the hornets nest.
Im sure Putin will issue his own ‘ Not a Step Back ‘ order. His Wagner thugs will be more than happy to act as Barrier Troops.
The thing is that the Ukraine hereto now hasn’t officially entered Mother Russia. Even Putin’s word that parts of the Ukraine are now Russian won’t change the mind of the average Russian in that regard. If they do go into Russia that might give some Russians reason to fight and would also allow Putin to bring in more resources that he has been loathe to touch and use. I wouldn’t put it past him to leave a tempting opening just so they do it.
At this point, Putin be like:
Much as I can’t stand Russia, and as much as I get that these Russian “men” don’t want to get slaughtered, it is disgusting that they are running like rats. Draw your AK and sixty rounds and line up to die, comrade.
What a catastrophe. They can’t even call people up without taking casualties.
At Least 6 Russian Military Recruits Die Amid Mobilization – Reports – The Moscow Times
90K have fled to Georgia. Check out the line.
In Photos: Russians Fleeing Putin’s Draft Queue at Georgian Border – The Moscow Times