Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to mobilize a portion of the reserve forces to join the fight in Ukraine is an indication of manpower losses, the White House said hours later.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday morning that the effort, which didn’t come as a surprise to the Biden administration, will call on roughly 300,000 reservists to join the fight, nearly twice the number that Putin had amassed at Ukraine’s borders prior to the February invasion.
“It’s definitely a sign [Putin is] struggling and we know that. He has suffered tens of thousands of casualties,” Kirby told Good Morning America. “He has terrible morale, unit cohesion on the battlefield, command and control has still not been solved. He’s got desertion problems, and he’s forcing the wounded back into the fight. So clearly, manpower is a problem for him.”
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The Russian leader announced the “necessary” call-up in a pre-recorded speech that aired Tuesday morning locally. He said: “Only citizens who are currently in the reserve will be subject to conscription, and above all, those who served in the armed forces have a certain military specialty and relevant experience.”
A day earlier, Russian-backed leaders in the self-identified Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic announced a referendum on joining Russia.
While the Biden administration has warned about the annexations since July, national security adviser Jake Sullivan reiterated on Tuesday that the “United States will never recognize Russia’s claims to any purported annexed parts of Ukraine, and we will never recognize this territory as anything other than a part of Ukraine.”
Sullivan also noted reports that Putin could be enacting mobilization efforts and said: “Like its sham annexation planning, this is reflective of Russia’s struggles in Ukraine. He may be resorting to partial mobilization, forcing even more Russians to go fight his brutal war in Ukraine, in part because they simply need more personnel and manpower given the success Ukraine has had on the battlefield, particularly in the northeast.”
The mobilization efforts come days after a senior U.S. defense official told reporters that amid the battlefield losses in the northeast, the Wagner mercenary group, which has fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine, has sought to recruit 1,500 convicted felons to fight in Ukraine, “but many are refusing.”
Days earlier, a video of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, went viral after he told inmates that if they don’t want to join the war, they should send their children to fight instead, according to the BBC, which verified the video and geolocated it to a penal colony located in central Russia.
U.S. defense officials have infrequently provided death counts for either side of the war, citing difficulties in tracking such data, though most recently, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl told reporters on Aug. 8 that the Russians were in the “ballpark” of having “probably taken 70,000-80,000 casualties,” a total that included those killed or injured in the war, which represents about half the total they amassed at the border ahead of the invasion.
He, like other administration officials in the past, referred to them as “sham referendums,” while the Institute for the Study of War wrote in their latest update that the referenda are likely a ploy from the Kremlin to get their newly mobilized reserve forces to “‘defend’ newly claimed Russian territory.”
Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the spokesman for the Pentagon, told reporters Tuesday that the referendum, in his view, “is simply an information operation that’s meant to distract from the difficult state that the Russian military currently finds itself in right now.”
Putin, in his speech announcing the mobilization efforts, also threatened to use nuclear weapons.
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“I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have,” he said. “In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.”
Kirby called the rhetoric “irresponsible,” noting that he has made the threat before, and he added that the U.S. has not seen intelligence to demonstrate a need for the country to change its nuclear posture.
Putin’s partial mobilization announcement comes as his military has been dealt large territorial losses in Ukraine as a result of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeast earlier this month. As Ukraine liberated cities, like when Russian forces retreated from the areas surrounding Kyiv, they uncovered various atrocities that restarted international allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ukrainian officials found 445 unmarked graves and a mass grave containing the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers in Izyum.
