I don’t quite understand the downvotes. Ukraine needs more soldiers, doesn’t it? Russia has no regulations whom to send in battle and how many. Ignoring the problem does not make it better.
People don’t want to hear that Ukraine will lose with the current level of support. Trinkets in the form of fancy weapons every couple of months do not win attritional war fought with men and artillery.
Not only Ukraine, Russia is also hurting badly for new recruits. The people on the front for Russia come mostly from impoverished rural areas and they’re running out of cannon fodder from the farms. Ukraine is racking up the body count, sometimes thousands per day.
After putin’s last “reelection” he refused to expand his mobilization as he doesn’t want to dip into the urban centers around St. Pete and Moscow. Putin is a maniac but he understands his support lies with his oligarchs and is centered mostly in urban areas. If he starts pulling people from the street in Moscow and St. Petersburg his support will errode and his power will be compromised.
Putin is a coward. He doesn’t want to get pushed out a window himself so he needs to keep his rich patrons relatively happy. Conscripting the urban elite doesn’t align with his strategy, risks compromising his support, and could ultimately lead to his downfall.
That said even the urban elite are growing suspicious of the regime. Drone attacks in your capital will do that to you. Some of his mercenary units have also started showing signs of discontent. Puttie is walking a thin line and is in desperate need of new recruits as the recent news from DPRK highlights. Hopefully this thin line leads to his death, very soon.
This is not Hearts of Iron IV or something alike. The pure size of an army or population is not a relevant stat when trying to predict the outcome of a war. Superiority of equipment, training, strategies, logistics, supplies etc are all far more decisive.
Equipment is absolutely important. But I’d say this fact underscores the importance of sending good equipment and weapons to Ukraine, and allow Ukraine to use it in the most effective way - and thus not having to sacrifice everyone to the meat grinder.
That is trivial, I thought.
Of course it isn’t the only criteria. Nevertheless Ukraine needs more soldiers, superior equipment doesn’t help you to win a war if there’s no one to use it or to few to use all of it.
And superior equipment would save the lives of ukrainian soldiers so fewer would be needed to fight back Russia. So the conclusion should be to supply Ukraine with what it needs.
However, you said
Russia has no regulations whom to send in battle and how many.
and that simply doesn’t matter as much.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course send everything we have to them, Taurus, F-16, billions of dollars. Damn, hit Putin in his Kreml with drones. We should have sent the equipment way earlier when they said they would need it and not months later. (Fuck you, Olaf Scholz.) If we would have done it earlier, we now wouldn’t talk about how to Ukraine needs more soldiers. Still send the weapons anyway. But now we talk about the need for soldiers and we can’t ignore it when Ukraine simply doesn’t have enough soldiers to handle all their weapons and fight back the Russian army on some parts of the front. And that they need more soldiers and have to mobilize is what have I heard a few times in the last weeks.
Okay, and what are “we” (as in Ukraines western partners) to do about this? We cannot send ukrainian refugees back with a gun and a helmet. We cannot wololo russian soldiers into ukrainian ones. We cannot conjure up soldiers magically. What we can do is send weapons, ammunitions, medical supplies etc. We can enforce sanctions against Russia and its oligarchy making it least profitable and discouraging to fight this war.
Or do you want to send troops?Never said we could do anything about that directly (maybe indirectly by sending money). I just said we shouldn’t ignore the problem and downvote the post.
That it’s not a video game means also that you can’t so easily refute the entire thesis and approach of the linked article by appealing to some kind of simplistic ideal model of warfare where morale and recruitment do not matter at all to an army. Conscripting the unwilling has its costs, and here we have one attempt to describe how some of it is playing out on the Ukrainian side.
Don’t judge things just from the headlines, lemmy. It’s a bad habit. This reporting is credible enough, and El País a sufficiently respectable publication, that it deserves better than that.
Did you recognize I’m answering to a comment, not the article? Don’t “Don’t just read teh headline” me, because you’re wrong.
The article itself is (imo) problematic, too, though. First, the headline feeds into the dangerous narrative that Ukraine couldn’t win the war. It is a statement, not a question that gets examined and studied. Second, the article itself doesn’t support the headline as a definitive statement, it talks about the issue of desertion and recruitment, not the actual number of soldiers. It’s a misleading headline. Third of all, it’s one persons opinion and observation, not an objective, broadviewed examination of the issues that tries to take many viewpoints into account (for example the influence of slow support by Ukraine’s partners, that Russia faces similar recruitment issues etc).
The Article is a representation of one person’s view, and it’s fine at that. But it’s nothing more.
My downvote is for the “accept cookies or subscribe” link
Yup, hopefully the programs to recruit from the pools of refugees throughout Europe actually take off. Train them well, arm them well and send them to Ukraine. Because they need the men.
sorry, what? I never heard of programs recruiting refugees in Europe for the war in Ukraine, do you have a source for that?
Edit: or do you mean Ukrainian refugees?
Forcing someone who fled the war to fighting in it only works if you do sowjet style “retreaters get executed”.
Yikes. Forcing people who flee war/crime/poverty and are likely traumatized into battlefield is some inhumane crap.Noone said forcing… Yeez.
The Polish government inventoried why these people chose to flee instead of fight. And a common answer was they did not want to be put on the front with 2 weeks of training and no equipment. Which seems fair.
So they asked follow up question, if we train you properly and equip you properly, would you volunteer to fight… and a lot of people said yes…
The first battalion was filled in hours after opening signups. Edit: https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-begins-training-of-ukrainian-brigade-of-enlisted-volunteers-foreign-minister-said/
I see. I didn’t know that Poland is doing this and that this is Ukrainians only (although on closer examination, it wouldn’t make sense to train other people of other nationalities). I was indeed figuring something else.
Sorry.
Polish one is going quite miserably.
