(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)
Before we start: I’m not sure what Vladimir Putin’s announcement about moving to “partial mobilization” means, but it probably means something.
Putin claims he is going to mobilize 300,000 reservists. In effect, he is pot-committing himself to Ukraine. Two things strike me:
(1) This mobilization probably won’t work. In America we hear “call up 300k reservists” and we have ideas about the professionalism, skill, and commitment of those reserves—and the speed and degree to which they can be successfully integrated with the existing first-line forces.
Russia is not the United States.
Mark Hertling rings this bell in a thread here. Even getting 300k reservists into the fight seems like something Russia might not be capable of doing in the near term. But whatever reserves they manage to wrangle will come in even more poorly trained, equipped, and motivated than the existing…
