As Russia scrapes the empire for cannon fodder, will the troops who have escaped service at the front resist efforts to put them there?
Russia continues to claw away in the Donbas but at a seemingly slower pace. Russia is counter-attacking at the Kursk salient. I wonder what will trigger a Ukrainian withdrawal. Has Ukraine grown dangerously attached to its conquests?
The Russian army looked to the navy as a source of additional soldiers. Ukrainian naval drones sank or damaged most of the ships in the Black Sea fleet and forced the remaining ships to take refuge in remote Black Sea ports. The crews of these blockaded warships had little to do and Russian admirals were unwilling to send their ships out to be sunk by the Ukrainian naval and aerial drones. Before the war the Russian navy has 140,000 personnel, which included 12,000 naval infantry. By 2023 most of the naval infantry had already been sent to Ukraine. More recently most of the crew on the only Russian aircraft carrier, the Kuznetsov, were sent to Ukraine. Since the Kuznetsov was undergoing a never-ending series of repairs, 1,500 sailors from the ship were available for service in Ukraine. New Russia sailors receive some training with infantry weapons. As a result, using these sailors as infantry in Ukraine makes sense. Unless you happen to be one of those sailors.
I've wondered if the cogs being sacrificed to keep the pressure on Ukraine will continue fighting. But often, troops in combat spend too much time keeping themselves and their comrades alive to contemplate mutiny. Rear echelon troops have more time and opportunity to express war weariness.
Do I read too much into this scraping of the fleet? Maybe.
But for Russia, sailors are a problem waiting to happen:
During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, many of the Black Sea Fleet's most experienced officers and enlisted men were transferred to the ships in the Pacific to replace losses. This left the fleet with primarily raw recruits and less capable officers. With the news of the disastrous Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, morale dropped to an all-time low, and any minor incident could be enough to spark a major catastrophe. Taking advantage of the situation, plus the disruption caused by the ongoing riots and uprisings, the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Organisation of the Black Sea Fleet, called "Tsentralka", had started preparations for a simultaneous mutiny on all of the ships of the fleet, although the timing had not been decided.
The crew of the battleship Potemkin revolted, sparked by maggot-infested meat.
Hell, Lenin celebrated the ship crew's mutiny as part of the failed 1905 revolution as a "dress rehearsal" for the Communist revolution in 1917.
So with some naval personnel being sent to the front, will those still on their ships--perhaps raw recruits lacking capable leadership--start pondering their chances of surviving the war a little more pessimistically?
And don't forget the German navy that sat in port with too much time on their hands during World War I:
The Kiel mutiny (German: Kieler Matrosenaufstand) was a revolt by sailors of the German High Seas Fleet against the maritime military command in Kiel. The mutiny broke out on 3 November 1918 when some of the ships' crews refused to sail out from Wilhelmshaven for the final battle against the British Grand Fleet that the Admiralty had ordered without the knowledge or approval of the German government. The mutineers, who saw the planned battle as a futile "death voyage", took over Kiel with workers' and soldiers' councils and then helped spread them across Germany.
The mutiny spread enough to end the Kaiser's rule and bring about the Weimar Republic.
How many sailors in today's Russian navy want a death voyage to the front? Would that revolt spread throughout Russia's military and into society?
Is Russia's importation of North Korean troops an effort to delay that problem by substituting dead foreigners for dead Russians? Because Russia is a large country, it could find 12,000 more Russians if it wanted to get bodies that way.
We'll see how Ukrainians react to Hessians being hired to kill them.
I'm not predicting a Potemkin kind of revolt. But with a war largely stalemated on the land front, something will break the stalemate and end the war. A breakdown of military willingness to fight is one of the somethings. And Russia has taken steps to make this option more likely by sending sailors to the front to die as more disposable cogs in the Russian war machine.
UPDATE (Tuesday): What's going on north of Vuhledar? Based on the maps it sure looks like Russia has advanced a great deal since capturing the town long held by Ukraine which defeated repeated and costly Russian assaults since early in the war. David Axe prompted me to check the maps.
UPDATE (Wednesday): Hmmm:
Russian forces have been making gains in eastern Ukraine recently, but comparing those gains to the initial deep Russian penetration into Ukraine at the start of the war misleadingly frames these most recent advances. For example, Russian forces seized the settlement of Vuhledar as of October 1, 2024, have continued to advance north and northwest of Vuhledar, and have made significant tactical gains in and near Selydove (southeast of Pokrovsk) over the course of the past week. These respective advances are tactically significant but do not represent a general increase in the pace of Russian advances across the frontline, much of which remains relatively stagnant, nor are they within two orders of magnitude of the rate of Russian advance in the first stage of the war.
This seems to be moving the goal posts quite a bit to minimize the significance of recent Russian advances around Vuhledar. Obviously nothing Russia has done matches their very early war advances into Ukraine.
The Russian advance may very well culminate before achieving anything of operational significance. But the advances are faster lately. Why?
My hope this summer has been that Ukraine was starving the front to create a reserve for a major counter-attack against a Russian salient inside Ukraine. In a sense, the Kursk Incursion may be that operation. But now the war will crawl along with positional warfare during the autumn mud and winter ice to see if warm weather and dry ground will allow someone to change the direction of the largely stalemated land war front.
UPDATE: Cruelty and desperation?
The Russian military command continues to commit seriously wounded personnel to highly attritional infantry-led “meat” assaults in the Kurakhove direction as Russian President Vladimir Putin attempts to posture himself as deeply concerned with the medical treatment of Russian veterans.
Dead soldiers don't need to be supported for decades the way wounded veterans do.
NOTE: ISW updates continue here. Also, I put war-related links and commentary in the Weekend Data Dump.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
NOTE: You may also read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved.
