Russia’s “partial” military mobilization will generate additional forces but inefficiently and with high domestic social and political costs, a U.S. think tank said Monday in an assessment of the war.
President Vladimir Putin announced the effort last week amid a Ukraine counteroffensive that has pushed his forces off thousands of miles of land it had seized earlier in the 7-month-old war. His defense ministry says the mobilization will add about 300,000 soldiers to the Russian military.
The assessment from the Institute for the Study of War says forces generated by the partial mobilization are unlikely to “add substantially to the Russian military’s net combat power in 2022.” Putin must fix “basic flaws” in the Russian military personnel and equipment systems if mobilization is to have any significant impact even in the longer term, the assessment adds.
Putin’s “actions thus far suggest that he is far more concerned with rushing bodies to the battlefield than with addressing these fundamental flaws,” the assessment says.
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Other developments:
►Voting wraps up Tuesday in four Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine where the Kremlin has authored referendums to allow annexation of the land. “The Russians are seeing the citizens’ fear and reluctance to vote, so they are forced to take people in,” said Ivan Fedorov, the Ukrainian mayor of the Russia-held city of Melitopol. Ukraine, the U.S. and many other nations have dismissed the referendums as “shams.”
►A ship carrying thousands of tons of corn and vegetable oil has arrived in northern Lebanon from Ukraine, the first of its kind since Russia’s invasion started seven months ago.
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Man shoots commandant at Russian enlistment office
A man entered a military enlistment office in the Siberian city of Ust-Ilimsk on Monday and shot the military commandant at close range, according to Russian media reports. The man, identified in the media as 25-year-old local resident Ruslan Zinin, said “no one will go to fight” and “we will all go home now.”
“In hot pursuit, the suspect in the crime was detained by the National Guard,” investigators for the Irkutsk region said in a statement.
Local authorities said the military commandant was in intensive care. Zinin reportedly was upset that a call-up notice was served to his best friend who didn’t have any combat experience. Military experience was supposed to be the primary criteria for the draft.
Contributing: The Associated Press
