November 28, 2024: Russian efforts to provide enough soldiers to continue the war in Ukraine have proved to be something of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. This describes the war in Ukraine as well. The war is stalled because there are few Russians willing to fight, or even wear a uniform, carry a gun and pretend to fight in Ukraine. Evading military service has become a widespread activity in Russia. The government calls it treason and threatens prison for the resisters. The Threat of imprisonment is considered preferable to service in Ukraine.

Russians call Putin’s Special Operation in Ukraine a form of mass murder against Russian men. Currently, Russian military operations in Ukraine are at a standstill. There are some random Russian soldiers who will fire their weapons into the air. Russian officers are ordered to keep their men from getting too close to Ukrainian forces because of the growing incidents of Russian soldiers surrendering.

The war in Ukraine, the first modern war for Russia since 1945, soon devolved into a multitude of problems. There has been a lot of resistance to the war among soldiers, as well as civilians. Efforts to evade military service continue to grow. In turn, Russian recruitment efforts have become more ruthless. Young men are seized, arrested, coerced or manipulated into serving in the military. If all these efforts worked, Russia would have over a million soldiers headed for Ukraine. The reality is that Russia can barely get enough new troops for Ukraine to cover monthly losses. These casualties are as high as 30,000 a month and Russians back home know it. Men seized, duped or taken from prison to be soldiers resist. There have been some major insurrections among soldiers headed for Ukraine. Threatening these men with imprisonment does not work because that gets them safely out of the way.

The morale of Russian troops already in Ukraine continues to plummet. The 350,000 dead Russia has suffered in Ukraine has been demoralizing. Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian soldiers who surrendered at the first opportunity. Sometimes Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to. While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Russian commanders were aware of this and had orders to do something to prevent these surrenders and efforts to avoid combat. That proved to be an impossible order to comply with. Physical punishments did not improve morale and willingness to fight. The main problem was that troops had no confidence in their scarce commanders (there are few company-grade officers). These officers were often just as dismayed at the situations they faced on the battlefield. Frequently there was not enough food, ammunition, or medical care. It is now winter in Ukraine and once more the government has not supplied enough cold weather clothing and equipment for the troops. Worse, the clothes and equipment were often almost useless cheap imitations instead of standard issue. This lack of support is the only thing the troops can depend on. Much of that is caused by government corruption. The government may have appropriated money to purchase essential items, but corrupt officials steal the money or divert the supplies to black market dealers who will resell the goods and share the profits with their corrupt partners. This process often involves Russian criminal organizations, which do not hesitate to kill anyone who tries to disrupt their bad behavior. This is encouraged by the corruption of Russian military leadership down to company and field-grade officers who sell narcotics and other illegal drugs to their enlisted men.

Russia’s leadership, especially supreme leader Vladimir Putin, was delusional about the continuing lack of progress in Ukraine or the reasons for that. Even Russians who thought restoring independence, since 1991, Ukraine to Russian control was a good thing and worth fighting for began losing confidence in Putin’s ability to make that happen. Each time failure in Ukraine became obvious, Putin would come up with a new reason why Russia was winning, and each of these was soon shown to be false.

Putin now believes he can eventually prevail because of disagreements among NATO members about whether or how Ukraine can win against the Russian invaders. NATO members agree about Russia’s inability to win in Ukraine but many politicians in some of the larger, and more distant from the fighting nations like the United States, Germany, France, and Italy, openly doubt Ukraine’s ability to regain control of lost territory. Putin supports this attitude by continuing to threaten use of nuclear weapons if Russia is faced with losing all its seized territory in Ukraine. Such a move is also unpopular in Russia and one of the growing number of reasons Russians are losing faith in Putin's promises that Russia will win in Ukraine.

An increasing number of Russians now openly oppose the war even though Putin quickly created laws to make such public dissent illegal. The failure of such laws soon became obvious in many ways. Anti-war demonstrations and physical attacks on military facilities, especially recruiting stations, are more frequent. Refusing to report when conscripted became more common. Another form of defiance is veterans of the Ukraine fighting providing details, based on personal experience, of why Russian forces are failing.

Numerous veterans are no longer in the military because they refused to renew their contracts. Many more soldiers remained in the army but refused to return to Ukraine and got away with it. Putin ordered that these soldiers be officially described, in their military records and military ID, as unreliable and unwilling to fight. In any other country a soldier who refuses to fight during wartime is subject to severe punishment, often execution. That still happens to reluctant Russian soldiers inside Ukraine where officers have the authority to shoot reluctant troops. Initially, as Russian casualties grew and progress was nonexistent, some officers did shoot troops refusing to fight. That soon changed as the troops threatened to and sometimes did shoot back or, in at least one known case, ran over an insistent officer with a tank. Not to mention troops sometimes shooting undesirable officers first.

Ukrainian forces have provided additional confirmation of this violence and collapsing morale within Russian units. Many Russian troops will surrender to the Ukrainians at the first opportunity and admit it to Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign journalists. This prompted Ukraine to equip some of its quadcopters to notify and lead surrendering Russian troops safely to Ukrainian front-line forces.

The number of Russian military personnel is declining because of combat losses and veterans refusing to stay in, even though being a contract, or volunteer soldier is one of the few jobs Russians can get because of high unemployment rates caused by Western economic sanctions.

Russia responded by lowering recruiting standards and accepting recruits or conscripts with physical, mental, legal, or psychological problems that would normally make them ineligible for military service. Russia has also dropped age limits for volunteers and is willing to accept non-Russians as long as they can speak some Russian and are willing to fight. Recently Russia rented 12,000 North Korean soldiers to fight in Ukraine. These men did fight, as part of the effort to get Ukrainian forces out of Russia. Ukrainian troops entered Kursk province in August and are still there, despite the aggressive North Korean troops.

Meanwhile Russian recruiting efforts are not producing enough new troops to be immediately useful because most of them have no military training and at least two months are required to produce useful troops for combat, so new recruits get only one to three weeks. Conscripts require less training and are often used for support operations outside Ukraine during their one year in uniform. Many conscripts are now refusing to show up at army induction centers and Russian soldiers sent to get these men often encounter mobs of civilians who oppose the war.