I see no evidence of any "flipping" in Crimea or the east. I haven't even seen Ukrainian propaganda make this claim. The link I posted last week quoted an officer on the eastern front who said 30% were pro-Russia, 30% pro-Ukraine and 40% didn't care. That was an area not previously controlled by Russia and currently under attack. I also mentioned the CNN interview with an older couple whose house was destroyed by Russian shelling -- they blamed Biden.
NBC News' Richard Engel was in Mariupol just before the war and for a week after the war started. He said from interviewing many people on the street that he saw a dramatic shift in public opinion the day the war started. Before the war he interviewed many people who were mildly pro-Russia or neutral, but it was hard to find anyone pro-Russia after the war started.
This poll is from April, but 92% of Ukrainians were strongly supportive of what the military was doing.
Public Opinion Survey of Residents of Ukraine
Conscription in general is not popular in any country. Resistance goes up when it's doe to send people to a war that is seen as a waste or one that is going badly. The Russians have been shanghaiing every male they can catch in the Donbas they have held since 2014.
Again, I've seen no evidence of 15 year olds fighting for Russia.
Some of the POWs look very young, though I don't know how old the youngest is.
The Russians sent out letters gathering information on women age 35-50. It's rumored they are planning to draft women in that age group to send into the war
Russia has 4x the population of Ukraine. And guess which country saw a faster population decline than Russia over the past decade or so? Yep. And that was before 7 million Ukrainians fled and millions more got caught in areas now controlled by Russia.
The Ukrainians slapped travel restrictions on all men between 18 and 60. Except for some men exempt from military service mostly due to severe health problems, all of the 7 million refugees are women, children, and the elderly. Getting those people out of the country are less mouths for the Ukrainians to feed.
From day 1, the Ukrainians started full mobilization of their military age men and Ukraine's civilian economy is mostly shut down with everything focused on the war effort. They need a lot fewer of those men of military age in the civilian workforce because there is less civilian workforce for them to work in.
Russia is trying to keep the peacetime economy going, which means most men of military age are employed in that economy. They are not switching to a wartime economy nor are they expanding the draft. The Russians dismantled all of the infrastructure needed for a full wartime draft, which means if they wanted to do it, they would have to start over from scratch.
For most countries in modern history who did full mobilization to send troops abroad, it has taken about 6 months before significant changes started appearing on the front lines. Mobilizing a population for home defense can go much quicker. If the Russians started today their army would not grow significantly until early 2023 at the soonest.
Ukraine is well down the full mobilization process and their economy is being propped up with international support. Russia's economy is falling apart with virtually no international support.
Just having a larger population doesn't make an army stronger. There are many, many factors involved.
Ukraine has a motivation advantage, but they are at a huge numerical disadvantage. And numbers rule in a war of attrition.
Ukraine has more troops in the field now than Russia does. Russia is not raising more troops in Russia. They have their conscript class for the spring completing training now, but those conscripts would have to sign contracts to go to the war zone and they are probably having a tougher time conning people into signing contracts now.
There was a story in Forbes that the Russians are planning on stripping all their training people out of training duty to send them into Ukraine. That would boost their forces short term, but at the cost of having the ability to train any more troops at all. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. That's only been done by armies near collapse like the last days of Imperial Japan or the last days of Nazi Germany.
The Russians still have a numerical advantage in equipment, but that gap is closing every day. The Ukrainians are already making use of NATO artillery to take out Russian artillery. In the first few days 12 artillery pieces have taken out 80 Russian artillery pieces.
Thread by @TrentTelenko on Thread Reader App
The Russians are resorting to mercenaries and conscripting any warm body they can catch in Donbas. Stories of mutiny are getting more common.
Sounds like a rationalization. Ukraine is losing ground in Donbas. It's very hard to regain lost ground, no matter how cleverly you retreat.
Ukraine took back part of Sievierodonetsk. They did what insurgents always do, they let the Russians take most of the city with troops laying low in hiding, then when the moment was right, their hidden troops popped up and took out the rear of the Russian columns.
The Russians have thrown almost their entire army into fighting in Donbas. Around 35 BTGs were committed to the Sievierodonetsk attack. The forces on the north and south parts of the pocket have slowed their advances because the large concentrations of troops for those attacks have been whittled down. There have been stories from a few places that the forces around Irpin have been decimated. One brigade was down to 12-25 men from around 1500.
It's a lot easier to gain lost ground if the enemy was decimated taking it. To hold ground you need infantry. Boots on the ground. The Russians are running low on infantry.
The US led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq failed in large part because the US didn't send in enough grunts to hold the ground they captured quite easily. There were not enough boots on the ground.
A rule of thumb for any operation to hold conquered territory is that once fighting stops you need about 20 troops per 1000 population to prevent insurgency. The US forces were too small and insurgencies developed.
The Russian invasion force was way too small to control all of Ukraine even if the Ukrainians hadn't put up a lot of initial resistance. With their losses, the Russians don't have enough troops to hold the ground they have taken. The Ukrainians have only done a bit of partisan activity in the south concentrating on regular army forces, but without enough men to hold the ground they have captured, the Russians are going to be pushed out when the Ukrainians are strong enough for a regular offensive.
Take back? They are a very long way from that. You know that propaganda we hear about Ukraine taking back land in the south? "Major counteroffensives" and so forth? CNN sent a reporter in who found a stalemate. Both sides are dug into trenches with very little movement either direction. And that's a location the military allowed them to see. Ukraine will need much more offensive weaponry to push Russia back. They'll probably need many more well trained troops, as well.
The Ukrainians have lacked the equipment for offensive operations until now. The NATO equipment coming in is allowing them to equip units for offensive operations into the captured territories.
The Ukrainians are conducting some offensive operations around Kherson but the front around Melitopol has been stable for a while. The Russians have stripped this front to feed troops into other areas. That will bite them when Ukraine is strong enough to switch over to the offensive.
There are stories that the Russians are trying to hold a front about 100-200 miles wide with two under-strength BTGs. There will be gaps in that line the Ukrainians will exploit.
The Russians are trying to hold territory the way Japan did in China. They hold and fortify strong points and leave the countryside unguarded. That works OK when the enemy is very weak, but an enemy with any offensive ability will quickly isolate all the strong points and roll over that territory.
Every day Ukraine gets stronger with more men under arms and more western equipment flowing in. Every day Russia gets weaker with losses of equipment they can't replace as well as losses of troops they can't easily replace.
Russia's equipment problems are severe enough they are shipping in ancient T-62s to replace tank losses. They are not raising more troops at home to replace losses. They are trying to plug the losses with mercenaries (who refuse to fight if it looks hopeless), men grabbed off the streets in LPR and DPR, and training troops. Only the latter will likely have any skill and be willing to use them in combat. But the trade off with sending in the training troops is nobody is left to train the next class of conscripts.