Conscription may be necessary not to win the war but to avoid defeat

President Putin needs more manpower but he risks harming economy and losing faith of public

It is a debate raging in the Western press and on Russian state television – will Vladimir Putin declare all out war on Ukraine in his Victory Day speech this morning?

It would be a dramatic move, to declare a full mobilisation of troops in what started as a “special military operation”. It would mean Russians would have to make sacrifices that they have so far largely been shielded from. For that and other reasons, many in Russia are publicly questioning the wisdom of it.

Mikhail Khodorenok, a retired lieutenant colonel and editor of the Independent Military Review, tried to pour cold water on the idea in a recent appearance on Russian state television.

“Let’s imagine the fanfare as mobilisation is declared. When would we receive the first fighter regiment? By New Year. We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes,” he said in a televised debate.

“A tank division would take 90 days,” he said. “A ship two years. And sending millions of men armed with outdated Soviet kit that has sat for years in warehouses against a Natoequipped army was neither militarily nor morally justifiable.”

Mr Khodorenok is a credible military expert. Before the invasion he cautioned against it in an article that correctly predicted the setbacks the Russian army has in fact suffered.

But Kirill Mikhailov of Conflict Intelligence Team, a Russian open source investigation group specialising in military affairs, disagreed with him.

He said the real problem was manpower, not hardware, and only mass mobilisation can fix it.

“The forces currently in Ukraine are badly depleted by recalling conscripts and kontraktniki refusing to go,” he said, using the Russian term for professional soldiers. “It is even worse than the actual losses.”

The result is undermanned, exhausted battalions stretched across long sections of front in the face of an increasingly aggressive and well equipped Ukrainian army.

“The other option is catastrophic defeat in a few months. I doubt they can even hold Kherson without mobilisation, for example. And at some point the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s republics and even Crimea could be in play.”

Losing Crimea and the parts of Donbas seized in 2014 would be a catastrophe for Mr Putin.

The public debate over mobilisation inside Russia probably reflects real divisions within the ruling elite. Initially, the idea was floated by marginal figures.

Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a former FSB colonel who was a key protagonist in the 2014 insurgency in Donbas, wrote on Telegram on April 20 that continuing the war without at least a partial mobilisation would be “both impossible and extremely dangerous”.

Mr Girkin is a bitter critic of the Kremlin and has been banned from state television. He represents a small imperialist Right political force that the Kremlin alternately represses and exploits.

But it is clear that more powerful people were already thinking along the same lines. A week later, Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of the national security council, argued in favour of full scale, Second World War-style mobilisation which could see tens of thousands of reservists pulled from their jobs.

Other advisers – especially those responsible for the economy and domestic political policy – will be lobbying Mr Putin to ignore such talk.

Mobilisation would mean telling the vast majority of the Russian public that they, too, must make sacrifices for the war effort. And it is not clear how they will respond.

But if Mr Putin wants to avoid a defeat, he may not have a choice, says Mr Mikhailov. “The Ukrainians have proven they can handle operational offensives.

“I don’t believe Russians would collapse rapidly. But it is a losing game in the long run.”