Vladimir Putin has ordered the conscription of another 133,000 soldiers to aid his war in Ukraine.
The 18-to-30 year olds will be called up between tomorrow and December 31, but parents have raised fear that the untrained conscripts will be thrust straight into ‘hot’ border regions close to the war zone.
The figure is higher than the same draft last year when Putin recruited 130,000, and in spring when he drafted another 150,000.
The Russian regime is facing an increasing backlash over use of conscripts close to the war zone in defiance of an earlier Putin promise to parents that he would not put recruits in harm’s way.
You really have to wonder where the breaking point is at this point.
It just shows how effective top down propaganda is.
Propaganda? It’s called oppression. It’s literally illegal for people to complain about this.
I won’t disagree, but the controlled narrative the Kremlin pushes is still very much the definition of propaganda.
And you need the propaganda to have effective oppression.
Putin has to have his official narrative in order to mandate that anything else is a lie.
It can be two things. It’s a machine.
Welcome.
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I’m not sure there is one anymore.
Dwarfed though it is by the heartbreaking tragedy being inflicted on Ukraine, it’s tragic too to see Putin’s militaristic propaganda embed itself so completely, even among the country’s youth.
I doubt even a full mobilisation would cause sufficient unrest to end the war now, nor would an even higher rate of Russian casualties cause Putin to cease his tyrannical conquest.
The last Russian revolution in 1917 was driven by military losses and lack of food. Putin has been avoiding Russian losses by using Indians, Cubans, and prisoners instead of the Russian population. Not sure how they’re doing on food.
You forgot the Syrian mercenaries.
To be fair I also forgot the Russian mercenaries. Remember Wagner Group? Apparently they’re being absorbed into the Russian National Guard now.
I don’t get why you guys view it this way. They, as Russians, are being utilized by the state and expended in a war of conquest that was initiated by an autocratic leader. The nation has paid a steep economic cost for it. That’s hard fact.
But it’s also hard fact that their Russian nation is gaining territory. It is true that their country doesn’t control its strategic environment, their historic rivals in America and Western Europe. It is true that the last time they let these rivals lead them somewhere, it was to national decline and humilation.
So yes, it is a tragedy, but the same one that characterizes the history of nations, and there is a rational element to the ideology that so many Russians now follow. The danger is the irrational element which turns this nationalist war into a racial or religious crusade, which are present but in my view not dominant.
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I can’t remember what podcast I was listening to, maybe a Dan Carlin series, but it was talking about how in this post industrialization + propaganda era the breaking point for nations is far FAR more extreme than it was in the before times.
The Russian capacity to throw seemly endless bodies toward a goal is virtually part of their mythos. The above quote is from Stalin in regards to defeating the Nazis. The situation couldn’t be more different, other than in the propaganda coming from Putin.
That’s when people bred like rabbits, Russian fertitility has been dropping for decades and their 21-30 cohort is one of the smallest anongst the population.
I find myself wondering if this is even perceived as a negative at all by the public. Certain people no doubt look at service as a job opportunity and some actually support the goals of the war and believe Putin’s hype about fighting Nazis.
Has the war effort even gotten through those types yet? Is it really taking fathers away from their families? Are those fathers not bought in on the war?
This is what I worry about. That Russia is not even straining yet, let alone close to breaking.