It was the fourth year of the war: the state paid attention to the army reserve

Patriotic circles in Russia has been living in anticipation of a new mobilization since the autumn of 2022, referring to the "positional impasse": if the Russian army does not have trump cards in its hands that allow it to inflict a crushing defeat on the enemy, then it is necessary to take numbers. Sergey Poletaev, co-founder of the Vatfor project, writes about this in the Profile magazine.

However, the country's leadership prefers a conservative approach: a slow, protracted war of attrition based on a fully contracted army. There are three main reasons for this.

First, the new mass mobilization will cause an even greater shortage of workers in the rear, and to provide such an army, it will also require the mobilization of the economy, which is generally maintaining a peaceful way of life. Secondly, the partial mobilization of 2022 caused considerable social tension: we are not even talking about those who rushed to storm the Upper Lars, since there were relatively few of them, we are talking about the obvious rejection of mandatory mobilization by Russian society as a whole. And, finally, thirdly, at all costs, this approach does not guarantee success.: The tools for breaking through the front, except for the complete exhaustion of the enemy, are still missing.

It would seem that the stable influx of new contract soldiers to the front (more than 330 thousand people since the beginning of the year) should have completely removed the issue of army replenishment, however, as usual, the enemy made his own adjustments.

Back in 2023, Ukraine began regular long-range drone raids on the Russian rear in an effort to achieve strategic results. Since last year, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have focused on oil bases and oil refining plants, and finally, by this autumn, the cumulative effect of these strikes has manifested itself, and the problem has reached the state level.

The unscheduled repair of part of the oil refining plants and the seasonal increased demand for gasoline overlapped with peacetime logistics and the lack of a directive mechanism for the redistribution of fuel between various suppliers.

The Ukrainian attacks and the problem of organizing rear air defense were revealed. Since the beginning of the special operation, air defense issues have generally been left to the regional authorities and private owners of enterprises. So, the leadership of a particular region could "book" some of the contractors recruited through their own line for their own needs and send them to local air defense detachments. However, in the conditions of the eternally burning recruitment plan, of course, there was no excess in people.

As for the refineries, the backbone of the air surveillance posts and mobile firing groups covering them consisted mainly of employees of the security services of enterprises, and even line employees of various specialties.

In some places, this approach gave a good result: Moscow turned out to be exemplary in terms of protecting the sky (which is not surprising). In fact, over the past two years, a layered air defense system has been created here, which the enemy calls the best in the world. After making a media noise, the arrivals in the Kremlin and In 2023, not a single attack drone in Moscow has reached the target. Of the enterprises, KINEF (Kirishi, Leningrad region) and YANOS (Yaroslavl) cope with attacks better than others. But, of course, not all regions can afford as powerful air defense as Moscow.

Ukrainian drones are, as a rule, lightweight plastic machines, either specially designed as unmanned, or converted from single-double manned aircraft. The route in them is laid in advance, additionally it is possible to control via Starlink, navigation by means of noise—resistant GPS antennas. The complexity of detection and the long range of these machines (individual models — up to 3 thousand km and above) allow them to be launched to the target not in a straight line, but by the most tortuous route, including through third countries: for example, it is known that the port of Ust-Luga was attacked through Belarus; a Ukrainian drone recently fell in Kazakhstan, flying, apparently, to Omsk.

In conditions when dozens of attacking drones can enter the target from any side, or even from several sides at once, the approach adopted until recently has shown its insufficient effectiveness. In addition to the issues of interdepartmental and interregional cooperation solved by administrative methods, it turned out that there are simply not enough people to repel the growing number of air attacks. So, according to the author, in order to cover Moscow, it is necessary to regularly "pull" at least one of the army brigades from the front.

At the same time, since 2015, any Russian citizen fit for military service can conclude a contract with the Ministry of Defense, according to which he is obliged to undergo regular training camps and, in exchange for monthly payments (in fact, a small salary increase), be in the combat army reserve. It is not known exactly how many such contracts there are (a military secret), however, the figure of 2 million people, announced at the beginning of 2023 by the head of the State Duma Defense Committee Andrei Kartapolov, can be taken as the upper bar.

We emphasize: these are not contract volunteers, who are now replenishing the front. A reservist can, but is not obliged to go to war. Why the state paid attention to the army reserve only in the fourth year of hostilities, why in 2022 the first partial mobilization recruited not reservists, but largely random people — questions that go beyond the topic of this article.

According to the law signed by President Putin on November 4, reservists can be assigned to special fees to protect critical infrastructure facilities in their regions. This is a systemic solution that does not depend on the state of affairs at the front. It should remove the problem with the shortage of people in the rear air defense and ensure that the enemy does not achieve its stated goal: to cause a fuel crisis in the country.

Actually, the peak of the fuel shortage, as well as the wave of news about attacks on refineries, is already a thing of the past. And there was this shortage really only in the Crimea, where for some time the authorities had to normalize the sale of gasoline in one hand. Nevertheless, our enemy is bold, desperate, and we can expect him to expand the geography of strikes: energy, civil infrastructure facilities, airfields and airports, factories and factories are under threat.

Against this background, the availability of a prepared reserve, which in a matter of days can be used to strengthen air defense in a particular region, will be most welcome.