“They still have the 138th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade in Kamenka (near St. Petersburg), about 50 kilometers from the Finnish border,” Toveri noted. “But the garrison is rather empty, without combat-ready troops because they are all in Ukraine. And the five brigades close to us already had only half their strength before the war.” And although Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made bellicose remarks when Finland joined NATO, no troops were redeployed to the Finnish border.
The over-expansion of Russia’s armed forces is such that it is hardly surprising that the Finnish leadership reacted calmly to Putin’s announcement.
Indeed, the Russian armed forces had such difficulty recruiting enough soldiers for the war that they had to cede certain areas to the mercenaries of the Wagner paramilitary group – not to mention recruiting detainees. Some 100,000 convicts have already been recruited for war service in exchange for freedom, and as these poorly trained soldiers are killed in large numbers, they must be constantly resupplied. (The former prisoners are also known for their marauding and looting.) It is therefore not surprising that, a few months after the start of its “special military operation”, Russia was also forced to execute a partial mobilization, which was only a partial success, as many eligible men had already left the country.
And now Putin – who said late last year that Russia had 617,000 troops in Ukraine – wants to further expand the country’s armed forces. But it is difficult to maintain a force of 600,000 in Ukraine when the total size of Russia’s armed forces is 1.15 million. Unsurprisingly, last December Putin ordered an increase in the strength of the armed forces to some 1.32 million; around the same time, Shoigu suggested that this number was expected to reach 1.5 million by 2026.
However, this still raises the question of where these soldiers will come from and how good they will be. It is hardly surprising that – despite Wagner and the former detainees – rumors that the Kremlin was planning a new wave of mobilization began to circulate.
As Russia’s armed forces struggle to carry out the most basic tasks, Finnish politicians can afford not to worry about Putin’s threats – for now. But the risk of Russian aggression will remain because it seems unlikely that Russia will fundamentally change in the near future. An adversary’s military recruitment problems are simply luck, and our luck will not last. This is why Finland and Sweden were wise to join NATO.
But this time, Putin overestimated the power of Russia’s mighty military and underestimated the ability of Western politicians to understand basic arithmetic.
Politices
