Nothing we've seen so far suggests to me that the mass Russian call-up is likely to produce the sort of soldiers that can engage in effective offensive operations anytime soon.
At the same time, simply throwing infantry at the problem can do a lot to 'gum up' the battlefield.
At the same time, simply throwing infantry at the problem can do a lot to 'gum up' the battlefield.
The recent example a lot of commentators are reaching for is Iranian mass-mobilization in the Iran-Iraq war, though of course a key difference is that morale and enthusiasm among Iranian troops early in that war was fairly high - the same cannot be said here.
Instead I find myself thinking about the situation on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918 - morale on both sides was frankly poor (the French army mutinies in April, 1917), but so long as the trenches could be filled and the artillery kept firing, the stalemate held.
And that, I think, is the risk for the way the war in Ukraine might turn - Russian artillery does most of the killing from behind a replenished line of Russian infantry - poorly trained and demoralized but cohesive enough to defend, while Ukraine struggles to push forward.
I think we can see shades of that future in the slow forward-grinding offensive in Kherson, in contrast to the stunning breakthrough in Kharkiv Oblast. I don't think that kind of fighting lets Putin 'win' but it probably kills a lot more people and wrecks Ukraine.
Consequently, my instinct is that the right response for Ukraine's friends abroad is to step up assistance and training to try to build up more effective Ukrainian offensive formations *faster,* in order to prevent the battlefield from bogging down in this way.
In a static or very slow-moving battlefield, hundreds of thousands of low-training, low-morale Russian conscripts (who I assume will deployed to the soon-to-be 'annexed' regions now holding sham referenda) could still be a serious impediment, supported by artillery.
By contrast in a fast moving, fluid sort of battlefield, poor training, morale and cohesion is a much greater liability, reducing the effectiveness of a Russian 'just throw meat at the problem' solution.
But achieving a fluid battlefield with modern weapons is hard.
But achieving a fluid battlefield with modern weapons is hard.
Of course in the alternate scenario that Russia surprisingly does slow down long enough to actually train their conscripts, the same logic actually holds - the goal being to ramp Ukrainian capabilities up *before* actually trained and effective conscripts can arrive.
In any case it seems to me that for westerners who 'just want the war to end' - well, the Ukrainians aren't going to stop, and Putin isn't going to stop. It seems to me that the least bloody, fastest way out of this mess is pushing the Russian army out of Ukraine.
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