Apparently not. If you'd actually read the article you posted, you'd see there is no mention of "protests from civil servants because it was going to be mandatory". It's an article about a single person's lawsuit against a protocol that was already in force for years.
A language with decades of declining use is struggling, that's just what the word means.
Good question. A couple of things. First off let's consider who is doing this. Imagine you're a regional governor and the federal government just authorized you to form drone defense teams for your region or republic, and quietly implied that you better get to it or else. Governors are awfully corrupt and awfully replaceable, with replacement often coming with prosecution rather than retirement. You have no federal funds but there is an old storage base with 40 year old Mi-24s rotting there, and a warehouse full of their HMGs taken off the helos for storage. So you quickly coordinate with the military (who's been instructed to cooperate in the formation of drone defense teams) to find out what equipment you can get, and you can get YakB-12.7mm HMGs (maybe 10 or so of them) PKTs from some old vehicles (maybe 20-30 of those) and a few old army trucks that aren't needed. You reach out to the MVD who also has an old storage facility in the area (back from when the Troops of Interior existed) and they offer some DP-27s (a disc-fed MMGs where the number "27" refers to 1927....). What do you do? Obviously these drone defense teams need to be armed, and they need to look pretty so you divert some funds from development projects to buy some bukhankas, or some UAZ jeeps (likely a mix of the two) you take the army trucks and say thank you, you use your regional budget to pay the salaries of your new drone defense team BARS reservists, and you talk to some ex-military types about which weapons to take. They suggest the PKTs and the YakB-12.7s. Is the result very good? No, likely not. But low and slow drones aren't the hardest targets to hit, maybe you can get a small radar or two (not for fire control but for early warning). Maybe you can get notice from the local air defense command for when drone attacks are happening. And you can probably down some incoming drones. So you pose for pictures with your new BARS-Mukhosransk (don't translate that
), pose with a few downed drones, and your job is safe.It's probably too early to tell. It could be a plausible lever, one of several. The mid-range and long-range strike campaigns are having a greater effect this year by a significant margin, partly backed by new technology (the Hornet loitering munition for example) and party due to scale. Delwin has a good read on the subject, I don't recall if it's already been posted here;
Ukraine chokes fuel to Crimea, Russian consumers, targeting military supply
Ukraine’s unmanned systems have cut overland routes and begun to target Russian shadow tankers.www.aljazeera.com
What's the current read on the Crimea interdiction campaign? Is it plausibly a lever with outsized effects, or just another would-be game changer Russia absorbs and routes around?
Not much at this time. It helps with strikes against shipping into Odessa, and the southern Ukrainian coast in general, but it's not that important.
You had a point? Lol
They banned diesel exports a few days ago (until July 31 for now) - and have been decreasing it significantly up until then - for this very purpose: harvest of the winter crop (highly doubt they are weeks behind; spring crops not even remotely close to being ready). Russia (normally) supplies about 12% of the total global shipments of diesel or about 3-4% of the global demand.
Thank you, great write-up, appreciated the walk through of the incentive structure of it, much appreciated.Good question. A couple of things. First off let's consider who is doing this. Imagine you're a regional governor and the federal government just authorized you to form drone defense teams for your region or republic, and quietly implied that you better get to it or else. Governors are awfully corrupt and awfully replaceable, with replacement often coming with prosecution rather than retirement. You have no federal funds but there is an old storage base with 40 year old Mi-24s rotting there, and a warehouse full of their HMGs taken off the helos for storage. So you quickly coordinate with the military (who's been instructed to cooperate in the formation of drone defense teams) to find out what equipment you can get, and you can get YakB-12.7mm HMGs (maybe 10 or so of them) PKTs from some old vehicles (maybe 20-30 of those) and a few old army trucks that aren't needed. You reach out to the MVD who also has an old storage facility in the area (back from when the Troops of Interior existed) and they offer some DP-27s (a disc-fed MMGs where the number "27" refers to 1927....). What do you do? Obviously these drone defense teams need to be armed, and they need to look pretty so you divert some funds from development projects to buy some bukhankas, or some UAZ jeeps (likely a mix of the two) you take the army trucks and say thank you, you use your regional budget to pay the salaries of your new drone defense team BARS reservists, and you talk to some ex-military types about which weapons to take. They suggest the PKTs and the YakB-12.7s. Is the result very good? No, likely not. But low and slow drones aren't the hardest targets to hit, maybe you can get a small radar or two (not for fire control but for early warning). Maybe you can get notice from the local air defense command for when drone attacks are happening. And you can probably down some incoming drones. So you pose for pictures with your new BARS-Mukhosransk (don't translate that
Second off consider the above in context. These are in fact drone defense teams, their effectiveness while not great, isn't 0, and they cost Russia in the grand scheme next to nothing to form. And with poor drone defense teams you can improve. They learn over time and get better, their relationship with regional air defense command improves, and before you know it someone from Rubicon or Kochevnik shows up to provide some training and upgrade their skills. The federal government finally coughs up some funds to support the effort, it's not much, but you can get a couple of decent-ish small radars, maybe a ZU-23-2 or 5, and a batch of UAZ Patriot pickups brand new. It's much easier for Kochevnik or Rubicon to improve the skills of a poor unit then stand one up from scratch. Overall it's a start, with room to grow and improve.
Lastly don't forget that those DP-27s we talked about are in fact in use with some BARS teams in Leningrad region, and also Ukrainian forces (who also use Maxim guns and not only for drone defense). BTR-60s and BTR-50s have been used as front line equipment, and nobody bats an eye at BMP-1s or M113s. Even older and less effective kit is regularly used. KS-19s 100mm AAA repurposed for indirect fires? Sure why not, UAF TerDefBdes don't normally get artillery anyways. Russian artillery with D-1s from 1943? Well they're howitzers and they work... YakB-12.7s look downright modern by comparison. Don't get me wrong, plenty of goofy nonsense occurs when you stand up a new unit from scratch and hand them... less than ideal equipment. This isn't the first and won't be the last time we see something like this. But it's no stranger than 2M-3M 25mm ship AAA mounted on MT-LBs.
As for the approach being pursued at scale, it can surely only be pursued at the scale at which old Mi-24 variants are available. So maybe we see a few hundred used this way maximum. My suspicion is double digits is more likely.
When one man gets stuck in the highest office without legal means of being removed, cheered from all sides (but internally) as some genius martyr sent by the gawd himself, one gets ideas in his already gigantic egoistic self… But all epic democracy and such. The “Winston Churchill” moves people as he sees fit, anyone who is perceived to be potential political threat is removed at the first convenient opportunity. Corruption is clearly a thing too. The what’s her name, part of the shuffle (and one of the main excuses for the shuffle) Ambassador in the US has resigned due to the corruption investigation. The removal of Fedorov is largely seen as a removal of an obstacle to keep the corruption schemes going, as a political threat to Zelensky (the post-war campaign has been going for a while now and it has always kept going for this guy), as a man who contributed to Yermak’s removal, as someone who Syrsky (and other “old guard”) greatly dislikes, and so on. At the end of the day, no one wants to break the old system apart because it brings a great deal of money via self-embezzlement. And I am not saying that Fedorov was as clean as a whistle either.
I posted on this subject recently (but Russia cannot fight without China).
Small sidenote: isn't that a pleonasm, since mobilization, by definition, is compulsory? Years ago I looked into the (currently suspended) German Wehrpflicht, and it essentially amounted to forcing eligible citizens into military service. In peacetime there were civilian alternatives, but in wartime conscription would still be mandatory. Maybe there are other examples where thats not the case, but I am not aware of any.
It's a good point, conscription in general isn't voluntary. That having been said, Ukraine has a situation that goes beyond regular conscription. It's not sending out draft notices and selecting people, because everyone ignores the notices. They have press gangs roaming the streets and grabbing people with considerable violence. There have been multiple riots to break out mobilized personnel from confinement at TCC facilities. There have been attacks on TCC personnel, and there have been consistent reports of recruits brutalized or even killed during their initial processing. Perhaps forced mobilization isn't the right term for it, but it should be distinguished from a regular conscription or even mobilization effort. What term do you suggest?
Without condoning any of it, I’d still just call it conscription. There’s nothing fundamentally new about the category, or about the violence surrounding it. The NYC draft riots, KMT press gangs during WWII, or the Khappers are examples that come to mind.
Yes, of course, it is a compulsory measure. The difference between forced mobilization (I think the formal term is “coerced mobilization”) and conscription (or draft) is in the names. In case of the latter, the draft notice is received by the recipient who later reports to the drafting centre (or whatever facility is designated for such purposes), where the individual is processed with accordance to the prescribed procedures, etc.
From wiki
And there would no doubt be buckets of articles talking about Russia running out of men, and the Russian military collapsing.
defencesecurityasia.com
To be fair, there have been buckets of articles about Ukraine’s manpower shortage.