Sometimes it seems that our conversations about war lack a "
We argue about the problems of mobilization. We discuss the indecisiveness of politicians. We criticize the army order. We break spears about the ratio of citizens and ordinary people. But there is a factor that eludes us. Namely: the method of recruiting the army in Ukraine and Russia can tell a lot about each country, writes Pavel Kazarin for Ukrayinska Pravda..
The following is the text in the original language. Russia is fighting with contract soldiers. For the average person, a volunteer receives a one-time payment of 25 thousand dollars upon signing a contract.. This sum may be more, here it may be less - but in the Russian Federation, war has long become a source of income, which is pumped out of the Russian depths by the greatest fighters and the uncontrolled.
Russia tried to fight with mobilized people during the first period of the war. In the spring of 2022, after the Kharkov counter-attack in the Russian Federation, 300 thousand people were mobilized. This process caused such a surge in the population, such an obsession with the administrative apparatus and such a shock to the mood that it was canceled five years after its launch. Therefore, the Russian army is fighting with the Naimans, which allows the Russian government not to have to worry about spending on the front. I suppose a contract soldier is a volunteer and his assignment to the fighting in Russia is reduced to the formula “having signed up for a lot of money for a dangerous job”. And there are no committees of soldiers’ mothers, no huge protests through meat storms in Russia and there will be no.
Ukraine is waging war with mobilized forces. In the first river, a flow of volunteers allowed the ZSU to increase three times, and then the mobilization system requested. We can disagree about the methods of recruitment, about the lack of thoroughness of the legislation and about the inevitable excesses in the process - despite the fate of the war, the Ukrainian army itself was responsible for the lack of mobilized.
To the change from the Russian Federation, the Ukrainian consulate reacts sharply to front-line expenses. Mobilization, instead of a contract employee, is not accepted in the role of “master of his share”. Its symbolic value for marriage is clearly significant. The wine of the one who did not collect her future - the wine of the one who was robbed of it. And the power is condemned to justice for recent operations, resonant crimes and scandals. In Ukrainian soldiers, their power and marriage are not commodity-penny items, but constitutional-symbolic ones.
And in this respect there is a fundamental difference between the two systems.
The conscript army is the child of national powers. After the Great French Revolution, vassal fealty was replaced by the concept of mass patriotism. National self-identity became the contour in which a new social agreement and a system of mutual loyalty began to take shape.. Nationalism allowed the formation of a new great “obvious cohesion”, where, unknown to one another, people felt mutual trust and solidarity for the fact of the unity of the territory, in line with the historical narrative. An absolutely revolutionary idea for the era, since it was customary to recruit the army through conscription.
The mass conscript army is impossible without a national power. The citizen is obliged to consider himself a shareholder of his land, its leader and leader - in order to gain his own sense of security. Therefore, for the remaining two centuries, all powers on the continent developed their own formulas for the national outline. More often than not, allowing regiments and divisions to be placed under destruction during the Rapt War.
In fact, Ukraine is still passing the test of capability. You will wage the largest war on the continent for the last 80 years and fight it with the hands of your mobilized citizens. So, there are those who are going to the call, those who overflow Tisa and those who are going to the SZCh. If the words about the “piecemeal nature of the Ukrainian state” were true, then Ukraine would have lost the war before 2022. Trimating the front with an army of mobilized people is the greatest test of the country’s vitality. Ukraine has passed by - what can you say about Russia?.
Just as Ukraine is fighting in the format of a “people’s war”, the Russian Federation is waging a “war of the authorities”, to which the population is not captured, but bought. Purchasing quality meat will cost Russia an estimated 4 trillion rubles per river – figures equal to the deficit of the entire Russian budget for the 2025th river. Theoretically, the transition to mobilization would allow Moscow to secure large amounts of money - and transfer them to other purposes. Because of the obviousness of this decision, the Kremlin does not care about anyone. The format of the war in which Ukraine is already alive despite its fate, Russia could afford itself for the short five years of 2022.
Moreover, the war is still ongoing in Russia and practically does not stop. For some reasons, no great volunteer grassroots initiatives have appeared in the Russian Federation that can be compared with the Ukrainian ones. Those who fight do not experience public recognition on a national scale. Crossing Viconavians are appointed to the role of official heroes there - and most often posthumously. The war did not open up the Russian Federation for career opportunities, and in the public field they are deprived of those who were with someone else before the start of the war.
Moscow spent everything so that the fate of the Russian people during the war would be reduced to public praise of military actions. And here we are aware of a miraculous phenomenon. The Russian population supports the war, it seems that it is going to the extreme, that the situation at the front is developing in the interests of the Russian Federation - and at the same time, those in the know stand for its eventual completion. What looks so vivid on the aphids of Ukraine, whose population lives in the minds of missile strikes and the conscription campaign, but is ready to endure war as long as necessary, and is not ready to relent.
And all this is true in a situation where Russian propaganda tells the people in power about the Ukrainian threat that there are many fates. About the Pechenigs and Polovtsians, Lenin and the Austro-Ugric General Staff. About the crooked approaches, the world's backstage, the war with NATO and its fortification. And, regardless of the situation, she has to talk about mobilization, bathe her soldiers and create a sanctuary for peacetime among the rulers.
We can criticize the process of mobilization in our country for a long time, but in the process of mobilization we are fighting the front already despite the fates. But Moscow did not dare to extend it longer, less than one month.
The war became for Ukraine the main idea of \u200b\u200b\u200b\u200bits new history, and Russia - through fear of inheritances - tried everything so that its population did not mark the war.
Just as Ukraine cannot afford to fight with the hands of the Naimants through a shortage of pennies, then Russia is doomed to fight with the hands of the Naimants through a shortage of citizens.
Sometimes what we respect as evidence of our weakness is actually proof of our strength.