Ukrainian forces staged an overnight ambush on a Russian convoy 25 miles inside the international border in Russia’s Kursk province, as the Kremlin declared a federal emergency and said it was transferring extra forces to try to snuff out a four-day incursion that has badly damaged its credibility.
A video circulated by Russian military bloggers showed a destroyed convoy, with bodies just visible inside some trucks, on the E38 east-west highway at Oktyabrskoe, a location far deeper inside Russia than any previously confirmed fighting since Ukraine’s forces crossed the border on Tuesday.
Commentators said the attack, reminiscent of Ukrainian attacks on Russian troops besieging Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, demonstrated an effective hit-and-run strategy, but the incursion appeared likely to draw an escalating response from the Kremlin, and its overall outcome remains profoundly uncertain.
How true even is that? My understanding is that they’ve been throwing conscripts at the front the entire war.
Mobilized troops, not the same as conscripts by Russian law. Mobilized troops can be any age but are usually older with prior military service (see below). Most of them have jobs and part of the workforce proper, don’t live with their parents except incases of poverty or family health issues. IIRC the last mobilization Russia did, the average age was 28 but that number lilely isn’t accurate. Mobilizations are also targetted to minorities and very rural regions of Russia away from Moscow and St Petersburg.
Conscripts on the other hand, are specifically 18-20 year olds with mandatory military service after high school. Almost all of them lived with their parents before military service and usually stay in close touch with families by tradition. In the 80s conscripts were used in the war in Afghanistan, and high percentage of casualties were these 18-20 year olds from densely populated areas, which caused such a public backlash even the Soviet Union was forced pull put from the war and as result of that Russia sees it as a taboo for conscripts to be used for anything but national defense and training during peace time, though in the case of formal declaration of war they would certainly be used on the fronts. Some people have gone as far as to say there is an actual law about that but I honestly don’t know of thats true or just culturual taboo (and given how Russia operates a cultural taboo is much stronger than any law.)
Kremlin and specifically Putin have gone out of their way to define the entire Ukraine War as a special military operation and not a war as a means of appeasing the citizens they care about (urban Russians) and using volunteer/professional soldiers and mobilized minorities instead. Now that Russian soil is in danger, its possible we’ll see conscripts being relocated to defend those fronts, but even that is sketchy because of the taboo along with it being an open secret that conscript forces have terrible abbreviated training meant more to be a primer for further training at a later date rather than a set of skills that will keep them alive and make them efficient soldiers in the army. Most of them probably never actually fired a weapon more than once or twice, so against a battlehardenrd army like Ukraine those conscripts would get outmaneuvered and likely mowed down, hence why we’ve seen so many Russian units on the defensive lines surrender after first contact. They are poorly trained, have now experience, and their corrupt chain of command probably was awol or ran away the second they heard Ukrainians were approaching their lines, leaving a bunch of 18-20 year olds doing mandatory service and substandard gear being told to defense against a veteran force with NATO supplied gear and armored vehicles. All the smart ones, all the cowards and anyone else left over not brainwashed enough to want to die for the motherland surrendered in droves once shots got fired.z