In the days before the “Victory Day” over Hitler’s Germany on May 9, which is so important for Russia there was much speculation in the Western media about possible announcements by Russian President Vladimir Putin during the big victory parade on Red Square in Moscow. in Moscow. This ranged from the announcement of military successes and victories to a further escalation in the form of a genuine declaration of war on Kiev.
Ultimately, Putin continued to present the war in Ukraine in his speech as a “purely defensive action” against alleged planned aggression by Ukraine and Western states. He also spoke of “territories that historically belong to us”, but not of further mobilization or expansion of the fight. By thanking doctors, surgeons and nurses, he also indirectly confirmed the reported painful losses of his army. In reality, however, a large-scale mobilization would have been questionable in view of the Russian army’s serious lack of equipment and its sometimes astonishingly old equipment. At the very least, the question would have arisen as to what material the up to 900,000 reservists should have been equipped with. Moreover, by taking this step, Putin would probably have admitted to the Russian population that the “special operation” is not making the progress announced by the military leadership. https://militaeraktuell.at/geotalk-21-man-kann-russland-nicht-besiegen/ In this context, it is worth describing who is actually fighting or has to fight in the Russian army and on the Russian side. The political Moscow blogger Kamil Galeev (in exile, MA, MLitt*) has published an impressive compilation on his Twitter account which sheds light on the entire practice of conscription and contract soldiers in the Russian armed forces. He also addresses the widespread practice of bypassing them and summarizes the population strata and ethnic groups that make up Russia’s army. His analyses also include the probability of soldiers in which units ultimately losing their lives on the battlefield. There are actually three parts
Much of the misunderstanding about the composition of the troops fighting for Russia in Ukraine stems from the external or Western perception of Russia as a monolith. However, one must divide the armed forces on the Russian side in the Ukraine war into three main categories: The Russian army, the Chechens and the separatist forces in the Donbass. They each follow very different patterns of authority.
The Russian army is a bureaucratic organization based on top-down authority and run by formal procedures. Cadres are interchangeable and do not play a major role, while procedures and formal rank mean everything. The interchangeability of cadres facilitates control of the army and minimizes political risks. The Chechen formations, on the other hand, are led by the informal power of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and his personal network. The mostly bearded fighters in these forces wear the insignia of various branches of the army, the National Guard, the FSB secret service and many other branches. However, these insignia mean little in this tribal, power-based structure. The “separatist corps” in Donbass were originally (2014) also power-based and were led by pro-Russian warlords via their personal networks. However, most of the warlords were later murdered (by the Russians?) and at least formally replaced by an authority-based leadership. In intercepted telephone logs, these local fighters make disparaging remarks about the regular Russian soldiers, saying that they do not want to fight. The latter, in turn, call the DPR/LPR fighters “crazy morons” (crazy idiots). In the beginning there is harassment
The key element for enlistment in the Russian armed forces is the draft, which is based on general conscription. In theory, every young Russian man between the ages of 18 and 27 has to serve in the army for a year. However, many make every effort to avoid military service, which is also due to the harassment practiced in many units for decades – and uncovered by the “Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers”, among others. In the “dedovchina system” (rule of the grandpas), which still prevails in many units, younger soldiers and recruits are treated almost like slaves by the older cohorts and repeatedly driven to suicide. 
The “conscription avoidance industry”
Unfortunately, Galeev does not address this aspect in his analysis. However, he does note that the quotas of conscripts are ultimately filled by the otherwise most disadvantaged classes and ethnic groups who are unable to avoid military service. The US army also recruits disproportionately from the poorer sections of the population. However, while recruitment is voluntary in the USA, it is not for the poorer sections of the Russian population in particular – which makes it a kind of “blood tax” for the poor. In the USA, people join the army, which pays for college. In Russia, it’s the other way around: young people go to colleges and universities to avoid the army. They can take this step either by winning a state-funded place (бюджет) or by paying tuition fees out of their own (family) pocket. As a result, Russian conscription totally distorts the education market. You are not conscripted while you are studying – so if you go to university, you can avoid conscription.
This means that universities in Russia are considered a so-called “conscription avoidance industry”, as the advertisement on the top right proves. “отсрочка” (deferment of military service) is the first, prominently mentioned advantage of studying. However, if students are later thrown out of university due to poor performance, they face the recruiter.
This widespread practice is also reflected in popular culture. For example, the film “Elena” by Andrej Zvjaginstew was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In the film, Elena is married to a rich older man. Her 17-year-old grandson will be drafted unless he goes to college. She asks her husband to pay the tuition fees, but he refuses. So she kills him – a constellation that many Russians probably understand. According to official Russian figures, a quarter of all soldiers are conscripts. However, Western observers assume that the Russian army has fewer soldiers in total than the Kremlin officially states – the proportion of conscripts in the total force could therefore be higher. The conscripts are not (usually) combat troops in the true sense of the word, but they do represent the greatest recruitment potential for the professional army: once the young men are in the military, conscripts are put under pressure (including group pressure) by all kinds of means in order to recruit them as temporary or professional soldiers after their year. These are then the “paid military contractors”, the so-called Kонтрактники.
Theoretically, the decision to sign the contract is of course completely free. Recently, you didn’t even have to complete the mandatory year (unpaid except for pay) to be allowed to sign. However, recruitment agencies and recruitment offices also advertise for “contractors” on public transport, for example. In practice, however, according to Galeew, conscripts are quite defenceless when it comes to signing on. They are often tricked, threatened or simply instructed to sign and thus become professional soldiers whose deployment abroad is legal. The deployment of conscripts is not, although many examples document the deployment of conscripts in the Ukraine war. The aforementioned social filter subsequently also “works” in the so-called “siloviki structures” (representatives of the secret services and the military).representatives of the secret services and the military), who give preference to candidates who have served as conscripts. This is also reflected in the composition of the National Guard (the so-called “Rosgvardia” with its light gray vehicles is not directly subordinate to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu but to the president, but it is a force of internal order that has lost nothing on the battlefield, as the enormous losses in Ukraine show), the general police, the OMON units of the Interior Ministry, the FSB and other authorities. They all have their own schools and the majority of their recruits come from the poorer and less educated sections of the population. This also answers the question often asked by Western media and politicians as to why Russian police officers and other law enforcement officers show no empathy towards grandmas demonstrating against the war, even with just white sheets of paper. They come to a large extent from regions and ethnic groups to whom the young urban civil society, which is also oriented towards the West in Russia, is at best only “foreign”. https://militaeraktuell.at/russland-bataillonstaktische-gruppe-im-angriff/ However, this is often just theory, as a compulsory year in the army is not the same as a ticket to a “siloviki career”. After all, a possible career in the state security apparatus is also of interest to the so-called “golden children” from wealthy elite and apprachik families, as well as members of state enterprise employees, who make up for their lack of military service with studies at FSB and BFS academies, which means that the prevailing This is a good description of the prevailing “class structure” in Russia. While the state ideology in TV and advertising glorifies military service and everything military in general – in contrast to the West, which is now all the more insecure about this – in practice everyone knows that the army is only for “peasants” and “lumpen”. 
The Wagner army
Another branch of the Russian combatants that is now also involved in Ukraine is the “Wagner mercenary company”.
Although Putin repeatedly emphasizes that he is “just a chef” (see picture) and that the Wagner activities are exclusively of a private business nature, Wagner (allegedly due to the former founder’s enthusiasm for the German composer Richard Wagner) was formed by Putin’s ex-chef Yevgeny Prigozhin in order to – in a rather unconcerned manner in terms of combat leadership – promote for Russian interests in Syria, Africa and now also in Ukraine.
Wagner has a controversial record. For example, they published a video of the killing of a local man in Syria who was trying to flee from Assad’s army. They killed him with a hammer, cut off his head with a knife and his hands with a shovel and burned what was left. A sign with “Wagnerowtsi” and the remains read: “For VDV and intelligence” (VDV is the abbreviation for the Russian paratroopers). In another case, they posed with a severed head. Details and graphics can be found at “Novaya Gazeta”. Although this most important independent newspaper in Russia (it temporarily ceased publication at the end of March) has identified a number of murderers in recent years, the Russian judiciary refused to charge them with a crime. How much Wagner is involved in the actual operations in Ukraine (there is a lot of misinformation circulating about this) is impossible to determine, but they are actively recruiting people for what they call “a military expedition into a neighboring country” (боевой поход по ближнему зарубежью”).
Naturally, former members of the army or those of the “Rosgvardiya”, who then sign on with Wagner, first had to go through the social filters of compulsory military service and then choose a military, police or even mercenary career, which stigmatizes them as extremely unpopular with those Russians with any form of capital (be it economic or cultural) (“wage butchers”). However, this does not mean that everyone who has signed a contract is a social outlaw. In Russia – in contrast to the “post-heroic” West – there is also a kind of “warrior culture” and most members signed up voluntarily, for perfectly understandable financial reasons. Galeev reminds us that volunteers as “contractors” in the Russian army (Kонтрактники) and those who sign up with Wagner did not sign up out of patriotism, but primarily for financial reasons. They are mercenaries, even if they had no better options, as they came from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and they (and their families) had not inherited any form of capital. The blatantly lopsided distribution of casualties since February 24
All this explains the strong geographical and ethnic asymmetry of Russian casualties in Ukraine.At the end of April, the Russian media research center “Mediazona” aggregatedthe data of the then officially reported 1,744 casualties in Ukraine and found a clear negative correlation between the median income in the respective region and the number of victims. The result: it is predominantly the poor, the less privileged, who (have to) fight and die. Caution: This is unlikely to change within the actual casualty figures, whichare estimated to be 10 times higher in the West . And this would not change much even in the event of partial or general mobilization; the well-established “avoidance effects” will also have an impact here. The map below shows the losses by Russian region. The two most affected regions are Dagestan and Buryatia (64th Brigade/Burcha, …). Both are poor ethnic hinterlands, one in the Islamic Caucasian south and one in the deep Asian east of Russia. In contrast, almost no deaths came from the large cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, although they make up around twelve percent of the Russian population. The bottom bar shows the media income in these regions according to Russtat as a correlation. This is up to three times higher in the capital than in the Chelyabinsk, Orenburg or Volgograd oblasts. Another graph (below) shows the majority of the Russian soldiers killed as visibly quite young. By age, many of them can only be “contractors” who signed a contract during or immediately after their compulsory service. Some are certainly conscripts who were sent to Ukraine illegally. In any case, there can be no deeper or qualitative training behind them in terms of time – a factor that is unlikely to change with more extensive mobilization steps, and is more likely to increase.
Another revealing graph illustrates the losses in Ukraine in relation to every 100,000 of the male population between 18 and 53 years old, by region, based on “Mediazona” figures. We can see that two regions with a particularly large number of ethnic minorities have been hit the hardest: Southern Siberia and the North Caucasus. In the more “Russian” regions, there are only two upward outliers: Pskov and Kostroma. Why? Both are VDV main garrisons. And it was the VDV airborne units that suffered disproportionately high losses in the attempted and failed capture of airfields in Ukraine right at the beginning. However, the reported loss of one or two Il-76s with elements of the VDV has not been verified by photos of the wrecks, which are otherwise present in an inflationary manner. According to estimates by British intelligence services, for example, it could take years to rebuild and refuel these elite units.
Above is also a representation of the ascertainable proportions of losses by troop type (the proportion of officers in the outer ring with an asterisk). Here, too, the VDVs are at the top, followed by the motorized infantry in their BMPs and BTRs in the modular battalion tactical groups (BTGs, with between 600 and 800 soldiers, although only around 250 are directly engaged in combat with the enemy). Before the start of the conflict, there are said to have been a total of around 170 of these in the Russian peacetime organization, of which around 100 were involved in the “special operation” before the withdrawal from Kiev. Now there are said to be around 75 around the center of gravity that has been shifted to the Donbass. These combat formations have recognized as a factor in the West for years and described as an operational enemy formationwhich has probably also been communicated to Ukrainian troop commanders in the years since 2014. Officially denied, but still present
In the days leading up to 9 May, there were increasing reports that Russian state-owned companies were beginning to actively search for specialists in the field of mobilization training via headhunters. A whole range of structures are involved in this, from the Russian postal service to children’s clinics and tax inspectorates. And in (modern) public buses, for example in Tver, there are advertisements for military service contracts promising a salary of 200,000 roubles (around 2,700 euros). At the same time, the police are now emphasizing in their announcements on the recruitment of new employees that they are “not subject to mobilization” and the trend is beginning to extend to private companies. https://militaeraktuell.at/wo-sind-die-10-000-russischen-panzer/ The “25 Guardsmen”
At the same time, starting today, 25 members of “Putin’s National Guard” are going to court against the commander of the North Caucasus district, Lieutenant General Sergei Zakharov, at the southwestern military base of Vladikavkaz. They are contesting their allegedly “illegal removal” from the Guard, which they claim was due to non-compliance with an order from Zakharov, who had previously wanted to send the soldiers to fight in Ukraine. In terms of its conception and equipment, this guard was designed more for the role of occupation and suppression, yet it had already suffered some heavy losses in the early phase of the war against Ukraine. This is a very rare form of open dissent, which is also reflected in the Russian media (albeit not in the main evening news). According to their lawyer (and human rights activist) Pavel Chikov, hundreds of guardsmen from 17 cities and regions are considering the same step and have sought legal advice from him. Other lawyers from a number of other cities and regions are said to be working on similar cases, including Krasnodar, Nalchik, Cherkessk, Samara, Veliky Novgorod, Simferopol, Novocherkassk, Vladivostok, Stavropol, Abakan, Pskov, Orenburg, Ulan-Ude, Petersburg and Smolensk.
???? Big revelations from @dmitry_gordon today, #May9th.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) @ServiceSsu, with the help of Western intelligence agencies, has information on every Russian soldier that entered Ukraine. Down to the serial number of the assigned machine gun.– Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) May 9, 2022
Chikov also claims that the true number of “refuseniks” across the Russian forces is up to 30 percent. Many did not want to have to kill their Slavic neighbors, as tens of thousands had half or full Ukrainian ancestors or still had relatives there. Many were also “deterred” by what became known internally about the unexpected fierceness of the Ukrainian resistance. And perhaps even more so in the future if word gets around digitally about what at least the Ukrainian journalist and blogger Dimitrii Gordon claims: according to him, the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU (with the help of Western services) has information about ALL Russian soldiers who have ever entered Ukraine. And just as the Israeli Mossad searched for (and in some cases found) Nazi war criminals after the Second World War, the same would be done with every such “war criminal” after the conflict – even if it took years.
Kamil Galeev is a Moscow scholarship holder who now lives “outside Russia”. of the Galina Starovoitova Program of the Wilson Center in Washington; Master of Letters in Early Modern History (St. Andrews/UK), MA in China Studies at Peking University and political activist. In 2020, he was temporarily arrested for his participation in protests, this interview also refers to this.
