Vadim Khlyudzinsky22:08, 15.07.24
It is believed that Moscow can always find more people, but this is a lie.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin is leading the Russian Federation to a demographic catastrophe, writes The Telegraph columnist Francis Dearnley.
If anyone knows how to falsify figures to support “weak causes,” it’s the Kremlin, he says.
“From Stalin’s manipulation of Soviet productivity statistics during his Five-Year Plans to Khrushchev’s Cold War exaggeration of his missile numbers, no organization has been so effective at fabricating facts to demoralize, confuse, and outwit opponents. Today, likewise, Putin points to Russia’s 144 million citizens and claims through his propaganda mouthpieces that it is ‘impossible’ for Kyiv to win his war, given that Ukraine’s population is a paltry 37 million,” the author notes.
He points out that by this logic, the figures released by British intelligence this week – that Russia has lost more than 70,000 troops in the last two months – become irrelevant. “Russia can always find more people” is how people justify Western inaction.
“We have been brought up on documentaries about the ‘unstoppable’ Russian bear, capable of tearing its way through Eastern Europe as it did during the Second World War, and we forget that this is impossible in modern Russia. For Moscow, it is not even desirable,” says Dearnley.
He explains that Putin remains cautious both about the number of men he recruits and where they come from, prioritizing recruitment in poor communities far from Moscow and St. Petersburg. But Moscow’s caution in this regard means it is obliged to empty its prisons, exonerating murderers and rapists so they can serve in the Russian army or mercenary forces. That resource is not infinite, however: Moscow is already turning to women’s prisons.
“But these are still relatively minor obstacles when viewed against broader trends. Russia’s conscription-age population of 14 million is not gigantic. Since many of them are ineligible or undesirable for recruitment for geographical reasons, their numbers are further reduced,” the journalist continues.
He emphasizes that the full-scale invasion has deepened Russia’s demographic crisis. Thus, the fact that 350,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the two and a half years since the full-scale invasion testifies to the scale of the catastrophe.
“Russia is not as powerful as the Soviet Union: roughly half the Soviet population came from countries that are non-Russian today, and even then, although twice as powerful in numbers, it lost the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This conflict highlights that military size is only part of the equation. Indeed, many of the vital components needed to win wars, such as military adaptability and modern technology, work in Kyiv’s favor,” the author concludes.