Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement of a partial military mobilization was decried by some as too little too late, but that may be because he had desperately tried to avoid this outcome and thought he could succeed inUkraine without it.
After the Ukrainian military made gains in recent weeks, Putin said he was calling up 300,000 reserve soldiers. The Russian president's forces were short on manpower while the Ukrainians ordered a full military deployment within days of the invasion.
According to Michael Kofman, a military analyst of Russia studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, he is a master procrastinator. He doesn't do anything until the options get worse.
Insider was told by experts that it could take weeks or months for Russia to mobilize, as they need to be trained, equipped, and deployed.
He should have done it earlier. Robert English is a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.
The risk of inspiring backlash among the Russian people is what Putin thought he could achieve in Ukraine.
He wanted to avoid it at all costs. English said that most well-off people in cities like Moscow and St.Petersburg have been able to ignore the war and go about their daily lives.
Even if you target the poor, rural, the provincial, the minorities, and still avoid the upper middle classes in the big cities, it still will touch them more directly. "The fact that he's resorting to that shows a certain desperation, that they're afraid of another big Ukrainian breakthrough that could be coming in a couple of weeks."
It appears that Putin was worried about the backlash from calling up the reserve troops. Russians have been chanting "no to war" in the streets since the announcement. According to OVD-Info, around 500 people had been arrested.
Simon Miles is an assistant professor at Duke University and a historian of the Soviet Union and US-Soviet relations.
"The one thing he had going for him was that the war was not being visited on most Russians, and that's what Putin and his state media apparatus were able to present an extremely sanitized, different version of the war," Miles said.
The Russian media used the president's description of it as a "special military operation", rather than calling it a war.
After Ukraine's successful advances, Russian media began to stray from the consistently positive coverage of the war, and published criticism of the military fumblings and failures of leadership.
It's a risk to call up people to fight if they don't want to.
According to a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works on Russian politics and economics, the protests show that Russians don't like this development.
It will take weeks to deploy the new units, which will show how badly Putin wants to change the situation in Ukraine.
It was suggested that Putin was prepared for the people to resist and that he introduced harsher penalties for draft dodgers.
He said that the draft could undermine the sense that Putin is in control.
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