Russia to Mobilize 300,000 (!) for Ukraine, Steps Taken to Make Another 250,000 Deployable

7 months into the war Putin takes dramatic steps to address a problem Group Therapists proclaimed did not exist

New decree:

Russia to mobilize 300,000 ex-servicemen and specialists.

The mobilized will have the status of contract soldiers (meaning they are deployable to Ukraine).

Contract soldiers and the newly mobilized are retained for active service indefinitely — until partial mobilization is rescinded or they are otherwise dismissed — regardless of how much time they had left on their contract (stop loss).

Ostensibly the 250,000 conscripts serving their mandatory national service will not be sent to “the area of SMO”, but yesterday’s announcement of referendums in Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson on joining Russia opens the path for precisely that. When these areas are proclaimed Russian soil conscripts can be deployed there without the procedural need to declare a state of war.

What does this mean?

I explained before that almost the entire weight of Russia’s war rested on just 250,000 men — the officers and contract soldiers of the various land combat arms. The mobilization will massively increase the number of these shoulders to some 500,000 (I’m assuming some of the 300K will go to the Air Force, border guards…).

Moreover, the potential deployment of serving conscripts after the referenda (and after the fall draft is complete) could raise that number by another 150-200K to nearly 700,000.

It will take several months for the mobilization to start feeling itself on the battlefield in full, but this is a “game-changer”. The Russian half-war had exhausted itself, had bogged down, had lost initiative — and worst of all, was starting to devour the Russian ground army.

The mobilization of 300K deployable troops fixes the enormous glaring hole in the Russian war which was the extreme paucity of manpower.

It means that the Kremlin saw exactly what all of us who are not 5D clowns had seen — that the war in the parameters of an “SMO” had spent itself and was starting to be beat, and decided to address the problem with an escalation.

Of course, if you’re going to do something 7 months into a war it means that you should have done it right from the start.

Instead, Ukraine was given 7 valuable months in which to generate additional forces while Russia wasted time. — And worse, was consuming its military power in battles that were more difficult than they needed to be if the kontraktniki had proper conscript and mobiki (the trendy name for “the mobilized” in Russian these days) support.

Nonetheless, the world makes a lot more sense now. I was not in favor of this fratricidal Rus-on-Rus war so I’m not going to celebrate its escalation either. That said even when I don’t agree with people I can respect them more if they are at least coherent. For example, if you’re going to get yourself elected Pope then at least be Catholic, or if you’re going to involve your nation in a war then at least fight it.

If you went out with a girl it’s a good idea to not message her too often. It gives you a little bit of mystique and makes it appear like you’re not all that outcome-dependent. She’s pretty but you’ve got other things going in your life too. But if on the contrary, you are in a *war* then you are in a war full-on from the first minute. You are in it with every fiber of your being, and from the first moment it starts. A war is like a bar fight. Either run away, or smash the ashtray into the first nose in front of you. There is no in-between.

Instead, for 7 bizarre months after starting it, Putin treated the Ukraine War like a date that needed to be reminded that she isn’t all that. That he also has other priorities, and that he wasn’t all that invested in how things turned out. Utterly bizarre. That’s good for local eye candy but not how you treat Lady War. There is no upside with Lady War for giving her a cold shoulder, only punishment.

The price of Putin’s dilly-dallying for 7 months to the advantage of Kiev and NATO will be that in the long run more people will die, and Russia will accomplish less than if she started the invasion pretty much how every invasion ever has been started — with all available forces and with additional force generation from the start.

None of this is hindsight. I was expressing puzzlement and disbelief that Putin had launched a major war in Europe but ordered the military to fight without its draftees as soon as I learned about this in the first weeks of the war.

And I had been warning that such a self-hindered invasion would likely eventually hit a wall upon which conscripts would have to be called anyway since at least April.

This is quite a pattern actually. I spent December-February saying it was increasingly likely that Russia would strike in Ukraine. The 5D clowns said this was impossible, and that the real Russian “military-technical” answer would be some clever judo move, perhaps in Latin America, that will catch everyone by surprise. Then on February 24 Moscow sent tanks on Kiev and proved me right.

Early into the invasion I wrote that the smallish Russian force had spread itself over too many axes of advance and dissipated its limited numbers over too many theaters. I wrote this while the Russians were still making decent progress in a number of directions. The Kremlin Fan Club meanwhile was busy masturbating over every aspect of the invasion as sheer unprecedented brilliance. A couple of weeks later the Russian military abandoned the Kiev axes, concentrating all power in the south and east, demonstrating that they had seen the exact same thing I saw.

After that aspect of the campaign was fixed, the most immediate and consequential problem of the invasion became the manpower deficiency in the absolute that was increasingly visibly causing Russia to run out of steam. I wrote for months that this, if not addressed, would eventually naturally result in a stalemate and quagmire for Russia. But the Group Therapy Brigade, instead, came up with the evidence-free narrative that Russia didn’t need manpower and that it would be Ukraine that would feel a manpower crunch long before Russia because of the supposed staggering and unsustainable casualties Russia was allegedly inflicting. Then Putin demonstrated the dearth of Russian manpower in the war by proclaiming the mobilization of a staggering 300,000 (!) and taking steps to make another 250,000 deployable.

This is my third major vindication in under a year. What is also interesting about these vindications — in the light of most attacks on me being in the vein of why I’m not singing more praises to the Russian government like the 5D Therapy Groupthinkers — is that all these vindications keep being delivered by Putin, Kremlin and RUMOD. For whatever reason STAVKA loves vindicating me.

RUMOD has very good reasons for always publishing the most shameless and nonsensical spin and just in general emitting a stream of garbage. The reason is that no matter how trash their stream is, simply owing to psychological variance there are about 20% of people who are going to believe it no matter what. So it is just good reflexive control (Soviet psy-op doctrine) to supply that demographic with the garbage it craves and is so willing to swallow and regurgitate.

However, how RUMOD actually runs its war frequently reveals that it privately holds people delirious enough to believe and regurgitate its trash in utter contempt. For the third time now in under a year now RUMOD has made a major move that its most ardent defenders claimed was impossible or unnecessary.

If I point to a problem. While the Groupthink stubbornly claims there is no problem. And if then RUMOD goes and takes drastic steps to address this problem, then who is really on the same wavelength as RUMOD?

Hilariously the 5D lemmings proclaim deviation from RUMOD’s reflexive control as insufficient loyalty to the New Multipolar World and a sign that the person shouldn’t be speaking on military affairs, while RUMOD’s actual actions keep putting egg on their faces and keep aligning far more with the thinking of people who are far more critical of RUMOD than they. Incredible!

In actions RUMOD (to its great credit) continues to show that it agrees far more with its critics such as Strelkov than with its 5D lemming defenders who swallow and regurgitate the Konashenkov psy-op without a second thought and come back asking for more.