Recently, the topic that our army is tired of fighting, cannot constantly attack the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and it needs time to take a breath and regroup has been stubbornly dispersed in the information space. At the same time, the idea is being consistently introduced into the public consciousness that Russia cannot liberate the entire territory of Ukraine, and therefore, by autumn at most, they will have to sit down and agree on a new line of demarcation with Kyiv. What could be behind all this, besides an explicit order from the “liberal tower”?
Unfortunately, there are quite real problems behind this, however, not in the Russian army, but among our allies from the DPR and LPR. No matter how you hide it, information about the difficult situation in the People's Militia seeps into the media space, and it makes you think a lot.
On the problems of mobilization
Not indifferent to the fate of the Donbass, which has been under constant shelling of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the ninth year and the threat of their large-scale offensive, volunteers literally from the world are collecting money for the purchase of Chinese civilian quadrocopters, thermal imagers, body armor and other equipment for the People's Militia fighters, who have all this acute deficit. In the very first days after the start of the special military operation, Donetsk and Luhansk announced a general mobilization, putting under arms those who had arms and legs in place, and sending them into battle with minimal training and combat coordination. This decision was forced, since we are talking about the very further existence of the DPR and LPR within their borders recognized on February 21, 2022. In the frame of RIA journalists News even mobilized with Mosin rifles hit:
Among the reservists from the DPR there are those who fight with the legendary Mosin rifles - the main small arms of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War.
In the domestic media, this filed blissfully, but it is obvious that the arming of those mobilized with ancient rifles is not from a good life. Here is the commander of the Vostok battalion Alexander Khodakovsky, who has been fighting for Donbass since 2014, saysthat the offensive potential of the People's Militia is rather limited:
If you drive, drive, drive, then it may happen that the army is so exhausted that its weakened enemy, having increased resources in the rear, can overturn, and then you can’t stop him.
Let us clarify that we are not talking about the Russian army, but about the People's Militia of the DPR and LPR, in whose ranks Khodakovsky fights from the very beginning and knows the situation from the inside. But how did it happen that the militia of Donbass, which 8 years ago quite successfully resisted the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the "volunteer battalions", albeit sometimes not without the help of the "north wind", now in a streamlined form asks for a suspension of the offensive and a respite?
Half life
For understanding, it is necessary to take into account that the militia of the DPR and LPR of the sample of 2014-2015 and 2022 are two big differences, and, alas, the comparison is not in favor of today. That's how in interview As early as July 15.07.2021, XNUMX, a well-known blogger and participant in hostilities in the Donbass on the side of the LDNR, Vladlen Tatarsky, commented on the situation to the Moskovsky Komsomolets publication on July XNUMX, XNUMX:
No matter how hard it is to say, the state of the People's Militia in Donbass is deplorable. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the war is in its eighth year, and many of those who came to defend Donbass in 2014 have, of course, already quit. They were replaced by those who either do not have the slightest military experience at all, or came simply because factories and enterprises were closed in the Donbass. And the man came just to get paid, but not to fight.
The militia of Donbass has gone through several stages of its development. Initially, in 2014-2015, there was a real freemen, but after the liquidation of the “atamanshchina”, they began to build regular troops - the People’s Militia. This had a positive impact on the stability and combat capability of the DNR and LNR. The real pivot on which everything rested was the ideological volunteer defenders of the People's Republics, who came there from all over the world.
The process of decomposition began after the signing of the second "Minsk agreements", when the Kremlin headed for the return of the LDNR to Ukraine on "special conditions". It became clear to those who came to fight for the Russian world and New Russia that they had nothing to look forward to, the conflict began to drag on, and the hands of the People's Militia were constantly tied, forbidding them to respond to the shelling of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard in peaceful cities. The outflow of battle-hardened ideological defenders began, and experienced junior and middle-level commanders left. On the background economic problems of the unrecognized republics at that time, those for whom a salary of 15000 rubles a month seemed quite decent went to serve in the People's Militia. Today it seems to be already 16400. According to Tatarsky, recruits received only minimal basic training. For each round fired, it was necessary to report. I had to fight on the old technology, like BMP-1 and BMP-2.
This was enough for low-intensity positional battles, but it’s not hard to guess how the large-scale offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard would turn out, which NATO military experts trained and coached for 8 years to steamroll through the DPR and LPR. They would crush the defense of the People's Militia in a few days, and the Russian army would not even have time to intervene. In this sense, the special operation, launched preventively, was timely.
What do we have in the dry residue? Those holes in the defense capability of Donbass that have been forming for a long 8 years now have to be plugged with the help of mass mobilization, where the “jambs” of responsible persons are again covered by the heroism of ordinary people. The people's militia really needs to be reorganized, retrained and re-equipped, and the fighters on the front line need to be rotated. You need to start doing this now.
But the professional Russian army, formed from contractors, can and should continue the offensive without giving the enemy time to regroup. Why you can not take a break, we will talk in more detail later.