Thread by @warnerta

If true - if Russia deliberately uses conscripts to hold the fronts against Ukraine's incursion - then for the first time conscripts are a big part of this war. So let's talk about what makes conscripts so different from mobiks and also so different from Soviet-era conscripts. 🧵

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1822304132218171540

Since 2008, Russia has had a mostly professional army. That changed in fall '22 when Putin was forced to admit his initial ground forces of about 200k professional soldiers weren't enough for this war. So he ordered a "mobilizatsia" of 300k more fighters: hence, the mobiks.

Mobiks were mostly middle-aged, mostly with limited military experience. And mobiks were mostly lousy fighters, reluctantly pushed into the deadliest jobs. But after nearly two years of high attrition, the survivors are experienced fighters, as good as professional soldiers.

Conscripts (or prizyvniks) are younger men, without prior military experience. They're called up in semi-annual drafts. which have been a regular thing in Russia since forever go. And, at least till now, conscripts have not deliberately been used to fight in the Ukraine war.

To understand the conscript role, we have to start in the Soviet era. Then, conscription was *the* means of recruiting for the armed forces. All privates were conscripts, and they all served two years. Everyone got the same mediocre level of training.

After the Soviet empire fell, Yeltsin floated plans to reform Russia's military into a western-style professional force, but there was so much pushback, nothing happened till 2008. What Putin finally did was a compromise half-way reform into a hybrid, mostly professional force.

So since then, when young men are drafted, they're offered a choice between signing a two-year contract as a professional soldier with decent pay by Russian standards, or serving a one-year term as a conscript, barely paid. And only the contract soldiers get serious training.

Why did Putin hang on to conscription? Mainly, corruption. Russian parents pay a lot to keep their boys out of conscription. And the poor boys whose parents can't afford to keep them out of conscription are practically free labor.

What this reform did was create a two-class system in the military: contractors, who don't mind spending extra time and are willing to be trained to fight, and conscripts, who would rather go nearly unpaid and do the lowest grunt work to get out of the army as soon as possible.

That largely explains why, when Putin launched this war, he left the conscripts at home. They had hardly any training. And they had made very clear that they weren't inclined to military service. Also, Putin feared the conscript-mother activism that arose during the Afghan war.

So what are conscripts going to do now that they're finding themselves at the front of Ukraine's incursion? We've seen what will probably be the main answer: surrender en masse. Sometimes so many it will slow Ukraine down just processing them all.

https://twitter.com/Danspiun/status/1821218979811119558

But also some will be getting killed, like this one in the tweet I started with, which I'll just repeat here. Actually he's hardly the first conscript killed in this war: many have died serving on warships (e.g. the Moskva), and a few other ways.

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1822304132218171540

It remains to be seen how many conscripts will be used. What we have clear evidence for so far could be accidental: they happened to be manning positions that weren't expected to be attacked. Apparently many conscripts are serving as border guards.

There are some 250,000 conscripts spread around various armed services, of which maybe 100,000 are in MoD ground forces, and of those only a small fraction are located in Kursk and Belgorod oblasts.

But with prisons largely emptied of men willing to sign up in exchange for pardons, and recruiting of contract professionals getting increasingly expensive, perhaps the MoD might be considering wider use of conscripts.