1 Institute for the Study of War & AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 21
Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Mason Clark, Kat Lawlor, and
Frederick W. Kagan
September 21, 9:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is
updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of “partial mobilization” on
September 21 reflected many problems Russia faces in its faltering invasion of Ukraine
that Moscow is unlikely to be able to resolve in the coming months.
Putin’s order to mobilize
part of Russia’s “trained” reserve, that is, individuals who have completed their mandatory conscript
service, will not generate significant usable Russian combat power for months. It may suffice to sustain
the current levels of Russian military manpower in 2023 by offsetting Russian casualties, although even
that is not yet clear. It will occur in deliberate phases, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in
an interview on September 21, likely precluding any sudden influx of Russian forces that could
dramatically shift the tide of the war.
Russia’s partial mobilization will thus not deprive Ukraine of the
opportunity to liberate more of its occupied territory into and through the winter.
Putin and Shoigu emphatically said that only reservists who have completed their initial
military service will be mobilized, making clear that Russia will not be expanding
conscription. Shoigu also declared that students will not be affected and told them to go about their
studies without concern.
These comments were clearly intended to allay fears among the Russian
population that “partial mobilization” was code for general conscription.
It is not clear how much of the Russian reserve has already been deployed to fight in
Ukraine. Western intelligence officials reportedly said in November 2021 that Russia had called up
“tens of thousands of reservists” as part of its pre-war mobilization.
Ukrainian military officials
reported in June 2022 that Russian forces had committed 80,000 members of the mobilized reserve to
fight in Ukraine.
The Russian military likely called up the most combat-ready reserves in that pre-war
mobilization effort, which suggests that the current partial mobilization will begin by drawing on less
combat-ready personnel from the outset.
Russian reserves are poorly trained to begin with and receive no refresher training once
their conscription period is completed. Russian mandatory military service is only one year,
which gives conscripts little time to learn how to be soldiers, to begin with. The absence of refresher
training after that initial period accelerates the degradation of learned soldier skills over time. Shoigu
referred to the intent of calling up reservists with “combat experience,” but very few Russian reservists
other than those now serving in Ukraine have any combat experience.
Reports conflict regarding how much training reservists called up in the partial
mobilization will receive. Shoigu described a deliberate training process that would familiarize or
re-familiarize mobilized reservists with crew, team, detachment, and then platoon-level operations
before deploying them to fight. That process should take weeks, if not months, to bring reservists from
civilian life to war readiness. Federation Council Committee on Defense and Security head Viktor
Bondarev reportedly said that mobilized reservists would train for over a month before being deployed.
A military commissariat in Kursk Oblast, on the other hand, reportedly announced that reservists under
30 would deploy immediately with no additional training.
