So in this context of the War in Ukraine, Russia's army is 15 % higher than in February 2022. It must be an effect of the decree that Putin ratified that imposed a draft for the Russians aged 18 and older to Russian military and another proof that they are preparing a large-scale offensive for May or June. That's why we the United States of America and our allies need to accelerate provision of military equipment to Ukraine to help them counter such an offensive.
No,
this was just the routine peacetime draft. Putin's not dumb enough to send them to Ukraine - he hasn't forgotten the backlash against the usage of conscripts in Chechnya.
I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen more separatist fervor. I would think people from, you know, Zabaykalsky, wouldn't be too thrilled about having their young working-age men drafted by Putin to go die on a battlefield 3,500 miles away in the name of protecting the ethnic eastern slavic peoples of Kherson from having to continue living under Ukrainian rule rather than Russian rule.
Apart from the already mentioned fact that this region is largely ethnic Russia, there hasn't been a draft since September 2022. As long as the new soldiers are recruited for money or from prisons, there is unlikely to be much opposition to the war - regardless of where in Russia this happens.
Tbh something I got completely wrong in the beginning of the war was the tolerance level for high casualties the Russian population wouldn’t have. After being able to interact with actual Ukrainians on the ground and getting more local perspectives it’s seems fair to Russian population is closer to Nazi German levels complicit in this atrocity and Putin’s hatred of the Ukrainian ethnic identity and resentments over the loss of the Soviet empire is very widespread amongst the population
The comparison is not even close to accurate. The number of Russians fighting in this war is minor compared to the number of Germans fighting on the Eastern front. Nor have Russians been indoctrinated into hatred of Ukrainians, like ordinary German soldiers were indoctrinated into hating Slavs and Jews. In fact, polls have consistently showed that few Russians harbor any animosity towards Ukrainians as a people Your whole theory rests on the false assumption that Russians have exactly the same information on the war as one can receive in countries friendly to Ukraine, that they fully believe it's true but support the war despite that.
the share of ethnic Russians is declining all the time, so that's a temporary advantage, and ethnicity is not the only fault line in a society and the rich/ordinary people and center/periphery cleavages are huge.
Nope, it grew from 78% to 81% between 2010 and 2021. As for the other cleavages, there is surprisingly little support for regionalism in Russia considering its size.
Also, it is well documented how Russia disproportionately uses ethnic minorities and other "outsider" groups to do the actual fighting in Ukraine. It isn't that hard to surmise why.
They did this in the Chechen war and in multiple Soviet era conflicts as well.
I've never seen any evidence that such a thing happened for the Chechen war. It's definitely false for WWII, where the casualties among ethnic Russians were considerably higher per capita than for other ethnic groups as well as for the Afghanistan war where they were about equal to their share of the population.
