Quote (Meanwhile @ 29 Jun 2024 07:40)
A very unbalanced article. Yes, the longer this war goes on, the harder it will become for Russia to recruit. I've been stressing this point for a long time, unlike the "a Russian victory is inevitable"-faction here in this thread. Nonetheless, the article completely ignores that Ukraine is faced with the exact same issue.
Two arguments from the article are particularly questionable:
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Putin and his comrades face a no-win situation. If they stop mobilizing soldiers for the front, they can’t possibly tip the scales and defeat Ukraine. Indeed, they’ll lose. But if they forcibly mobilize soldiers, they will only increase the incentives for deserting, thereby undermining the war effort.
Not necessarily true. Russia currently enjoys such a numerical advantage and has such heavily fortified positions that they could most definitely hold their current territory even if their recruiting dried up, not least because Ukraine won't be able to come up with a big surge in troop strength either. So the default assumption for the outcome of this war if Russia fails to solve its recruitment issues has to be a stalemate along the current lines, rather than a Russian defeat.
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We don’t know when the tipping point for rational flight will be reached, but we can hazard two guesses. First, Russians will be more likely to refuse to fight the longer the war continues. As the supply of volunteers dries up and forcible mobilization proves counterproductive, conditions for the overtaxed front soldiers will become intolerable. Time is anything but on Putin’s side.
This conclusion doesn't follow from the premise that Russia has recruitment issues, unless we additionally make the highly implausible assumption that Ukraine doesn't suffer from similar issues. There are other reasons to argue that time is not on Russia's side, but recruitment is not one of them.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 29 2024 09:28am