“Their attacks will be aggressive, but not dangerous,” a soldier who spent several months on the front lines of the southern Mykolaiv region told Al Jazeera. Analysts are a little more cautious. On Wednesday in a televised address, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the mobilization of 300,000 men to “protect our homeland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity and ensure the safety of our people and people in the liberated territories” of Ukraine. But the real number of those to be mobilized is one million men, Novaya Gazeta Europe, the exiled edition of Russia’s oldest independent newspaper, claimed on Thursday, citing a top secret decree and a source in Putin’s government. The Kremlin denied this report. The partial mobilization follows Ukraine’s surprise counter-offensive in the eastern Kharkiv region that was almost completely liberated from Russian troops earlier this month. And Ukrainian forces are poised to strike back in three other directions, observers say. One is in the Luhansk region located south of Kharkiv, where the counterattack will be concentrated along the strategic Siverskyi Donets River. Fierce fighting with heavy casualties took place there in the summer after Moscow withdrew its forces from four northern regions and the capital Kyiv. The second direction is in the southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia, around the city of Hulyaipole, from where the Ukrainians can wedge deep into the Russian-held areas and cut them in half. And the third is the southern region of Kherson, an entrance to the annexed Crimean peninsula that was seized in early March, possibly due to betrayal by Ukrainian officials. If the Ukrainian counterattack takes place in the next few days, Russia will not have time to train and deploy newly mobilized troops. Russian forces “should use [the mobilised troops] to form a second line of defense about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away from the current front line,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia expert at Germany’s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera. The Russians will have to replenish their battalions, which have a “huge deficit” in manpower due to heavy, heartbreaking losses in the past six months, he said. “If by mid-October Ukrainian forces can break through the front lines in at least two directions and advance at least 50 kilometers (30 miles), they will deal a heavy blow to Russian forces that will reverse the mobilization,” Mitrokhin said. . As a result, the inevitable loss of armored vehicles and artillery will greatly hinder the revival of Russia’s military power in the occupied territories, he said. But if there is no successful Ukrainian breakthrough, the Russians could restore the combat readiness of many front-line units. “It doesn’t mean they will be ready to attack, but they could hold the front line,” Mitrokhin said.
“We will face attacks”: Separatists
Pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine are far from sanguine about the impending Ukrainian counteroffensive. “We will face attacks from all sides, and their goal will be to destabilize and divide us,” Aleksandr Khodakovsky, who commands the eastern battalion of pro-Russian separatists in the southeastern Donetsk region, told Telegram on Thursday. “We are not dynamic, we act passively and a lot of what we say often contradicts what we do,” he said, referring to the Kremlin’s and separatist leaders’ bragging about further “liberation” of Ukraine. Although Putin’s announcement of a “partial mobilization” made global headlines, Russia has already stepped up recruitment, according to rights groups, opposition figures and media reports. Newly recruited, mostly teenage conscripts were pressured to sign up for front-line service. Older men with previous military experience were lured with promises of high salaries and huge indemnities in the event of their death. Thousands of prisoners were recruited from prisons across Russia to join Wagner’s private army led by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s Chef”. “They have already done a partial mobilization and they legalized it only now, they got more rights to do it by force,” Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera. But the mobilization will undoubtedly end in a logistical and financial quagmire. “The 300,000 will have to be armed and fed somehow, and that’s doubtful,” he said. And the quality of the recruits will be light years away from the 170,000 experienced soldiers Moscow used to invade Ukraine in February, after a year of intense training and team-building. Therefore, the Kremlin will use the archaic model of mass attacks involving huge numbers of soldiers – and gigantic casualties. This is the tactic Soviet leader Joseph Stalin used against Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. It resulted in the largest loss of military personnel and civilian population in history – 27 million people. “They will resort to the old Russian way of using the principle of gangs, using quantity [of servicemen]because the quality is problematic,” said Romanenko. Ukraine should offset the quantitative increase by accelerating its counterattacks, conducting pre-emptive strikes along the 2,700-kilometer (1,677-mile) front line, especially the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) length of the active war, he said. . Successful counterattacks like the one in Kharkiv could even cause unrest in Russia and topple Putin’s government, Romanenko said. “If there are two such [counteroffensives]quantity will become quality and it will start a domino effect that will destroy Putin and all his company,” he said.
Airplanes and foreigners
Putin’s announcement created a sense of panic among Russian men, who rushed to buy plane tickets, sending prices skyrocketing. Their hasty flight continues the exodus of hundreds of thousands of middle-class Russians that followed the start of the war in February. Many Russian families who can afford a relocation abroad have already sheltered their sons. “We will not go back, I am not risking their lives,” the mother of two sons, aged 17 and 21, who moved to Montenegro in July, told Al Jazeera. “Better they be poor and alive here than dead heroes back home.” In addition to mobilizing Russian nationals, the Kremlin seeks to recruit foreigners with promises of Russian citizenship, the holy grail of millions of migrant workers from former Soviet republics. The step mainly targets ex-Soviet Central Asian nationals, the largest group of migrant workers who suffer from corrupt police and bureaucratic problems that can be solved once they get a burgundy Russian passport. Heavily influenced by the Kremlin and their parents’ nostalgia for the Soviet era, some are already ready to volunteer. In early August, Jahongir Jalolov, a leader of the Uzbek community in the Ural region of Perm, came up with the idea of creating a battalion of pro-Russian Uzbeks. “We live and work in Russia. It’s not just necessary, we have to justify the bread we eat,” he said standing next to a Russian flag and addressing several dozen Uzbeks who greeted his speech with applause. After Putin’s mobilization announcement, prominent Uzbeks launched an online campaign urging their compatriots not to be drafted and reminding them of possible criminal prosecution back home for becoming “mercenaries.” “Listening to the ‘white tsar’, I realized that Uzbeks have every chance to legally participate in this suicidal war,” Timur Numanov, a blogger in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, told Al Jazeera. “Today, there must be a call … to urge the authorities to denounce the Uzbek-Russian treaties of alliance because [Russian] side is inadequate,” he said.
