Russia Goes Full Blown Soviet Style
State of surveillance is unleashed on its citizens
Digital Authoritarianism.
Those were the choice words, the Institute for the Study of War, used to describe Kremlin’s effort to reel in Russian men who dodge conscription.
Earlier this week, the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, passed a bill that prohibits anyone called up for military service in Ukraine from leaving the country.
“The measures adopted by the Duma on Tuesday also included a provision to introduce electronic draft summonses and steps to close loopholes in the system to make it more difficult for draftees to avoid notifications.
Under the new law, a summons would be marked as formally received as soon as it landed in a recipient’s inbox on a widely used government services website. Even if the draftee did not have an account, a call-up notice would be marked as officially received seven days after being added to the registry.
Russians called up would immediately be forbidden to leave the country. And failure to turn up at a local conscription office within 20 days of receiving a draft notice could result in a variety of penalties, including a driver’s license suspension, along with a block on registering real estate and other property and on receiving a bank loan”.
Welcome to the new Russia, the old Soviet Union, where you don’t have the right to not read your own inbox.
Why Digital Authoritarianism?
Two factors:
- During COVID, the Russian bureaucracy built expertise in tracking and targeting people using technology.
- Putin does not want to order full mobilization due to his fears of civil unrest.
Russia used facial recognition, and mobile device geo-tracking technology to enforce a draconian COVID-19 quarantine in 2020. Russia went full blown surveillance mode to track COVID patients and their contacts. They even forced COVID patients to take selfies every two hours to prove that they are under self-quarantine. Any one who didn't send the selfie on time, were slapped with heavy fines.
They had successfully created a surveillance state during the COVID period. Now, the Russian government is seeking to leverage that expertise to reduce the likelihood of Russian men escaping the military draft.
- The Russian government will create a digital unified register that will hold the details about all Russian citizens who are eligible to serve in the military.
- This register extracts information from nearly all the Russian institutions such as Russia’s Federal Tax Service, investigative bodies, courts, medical institutions, the Russian Pension and Social Insurance Fund, the Central Election Commission, and federal and local authorities.
- Military recruitment offices will use this register to target men and summon them to show up at the recruitment center.
The choice is simple for Russian men: They can die in Ukraine or not live in Russia. But there is a small problem. Russia’s decision to expand the draft and stay on a daily recruitment mode is not going to help them turn things around in Ukraine. The Russian military needs full mobilization and even that may not be enough.
At the start of the invasion, Russia had sent its first army of more than 150,000 soldiers into Ukraine. The objective was to topple Kyiv and occupy a third of the country. By September 2022, a third of that army was killed and they were pushed back in the Kharkiv sector. The stunning defeat forced Putin to order partial mobilization because he realized his battalion tactical groups were not strong enough to hold the line against Ukraine’s offensive.
Russia mobilized nearly 300,000 men. The second army was tasked to take control of Donbas and move the frontline to secure positions that can help them defend better against the anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. It did not work. Now they are trying to capture at least three towns, Bakhmut Vuhledar and Avdiivka to declare victory. Even that does not seem to be a given.
Russia doubled the size of its army, but could not achieve scaled down objectives.
Just because you draft men into the army does not mean they automatically became soldiers. The rate at which Russia has been losing soldiers at the front line has made it near impossible for Russia to train the new recruits.
Even a full mobilization will not help because training soldiers takes time. To rebuild a good, professional army, Russia needs months, if not years.
Bullets don’t leave the gun and home in on the target on their own. You need men who want to make those bullets count. Men who want to fight. You need time to train those men and good weapons to arm them.
Putin’s half baked plan to draft 147,000 men by July 15th is not going to help him win his war against Ukraine.
Putin may not be aware of the full extent of the problem
The Russian government and the military are fighting over over the amount of casualties in the Ukraine war. The domestic intelligence agency accuses the military of hiding the actual number of casualties.
In one document, American intelligence officials say that Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., has “accused” the country’s Defense Ministry “of obfuscating Russian casualties in Ukraine.” The finding highlights “the continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command,”
The highly centralized command structure Putin has created in Russia does not allow those in the lower part of the chain to transfer bad news higher. The Russian bureaucracy has been trained to hide bad news and exaggerate favorable news.
That is how the Kremlin operates. It did not tell Russian citizens that Putin is waging a war against Ukraine. They told them they are entering Ukraine to help them and it will be a special military operation. Kremlin lies to its own people.
So it is of no surprise to see the Russian military officials behave in a similar manner. It is a top-down culture.
Putin gets his information from a very small group of people. The odds are indeed quite high for Putin to not be aware of the full extent of the mauling his second army has received in Ukraine.
So, unless he sees the results on the ground, where the Russian army gets beaten back badly, he is going to assume that things are not that bad. He did a very similar thing last year as well.
The Russian military blogging community kept asking him to order mobilization. He refused, despite western media reports showing colossal human losses suffered by his army. He only acted after Ukraine liberated thousands of square kilometers.
After looking at the amount of losses Russia accumulated in January and February 2023, I wrote that Putin has to order another round of mobilization to stay in the fight.
It has been almost two months since I wrote that story.
Putin has not ordered a second round of mobilization. Instead, he increased the size of the regular Russian draft and topped it up with measures to ensure that no one escaped the call to join his army of dead.
→Putin is once again setting up his army to fail against the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
→Once again, Russia has blown another opportunity provided to them by the west.
By failing to manufacture the ammunition Ukraine needs, the west has delayed the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Ukrainian army won’t have multiple chances to deliver the cutting blow to the Russian army. Before moving forward, they will have to collect as much ammunition and weapons as they need. It is still taking the west a long time to give those weapons.
Russia could have used this time to better prepare their army to defend the territory they are currently holding. But they are still very busy trying to win three small towns of no strategic value. The amount of resources the failed eastern offensive continues to consume will be detrimental to Russia’s chances to hold the line against Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russians must conserve their firepower, manpower, and strengthen their defensive posture.
They should focus only on that. But they haven’t. They are still attacking and losing more than 500 lives every day on average. Now, I am getting more confident in the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, because between the two armies, Ukraine understands the value of waiting for the right time to attack.
