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Up until a few years ago, every army unit had to fill its ranks with reservists before it could deploy for battle. The top brass switched to a focus on creating divisions and units in a constant state of battle readiness, made up of professional soldiers and ready to deploy soon after receiving the order.
As a result, when Putin issued the order for a so-called "snap inspection" last March and April, the army deployed upward of 40,000 to 50,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in just 24 hours.
But now we see the other side of that coin. In March 2014 the Kremlin refused to repeat the "Crimean scenario" in eastern and southern Ukraine.
It would have proven simple enough to seize the Donetsk and Luhansk regions at that time, but a far more daunting task to create a new border — or "line of demarcation" as it is now called — and to set up military checkpoints at the hundreds or even thousands of roads intersecting it, and defend them over a long period of time. That is a task calling for many more than the 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers currently available.
And even now when the battle-ready units send out only their tactical battalions, they experience a personnel shortage that is becoming increasingly difficult to fill.
There is no escaping the fact that, for the last several years, the Russian armed forces have been organized according to the model first proposed by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell who said that troops should be used for as short a time as possible, should deploy on a massive scale and should immediately withdraw after attaining their objective. However, the war in Ukraine imposes a different set of requirements.
That is why the military chiefs are now faced with the need to increase the number of troops. But Russia lacks the required number of professional soldiers. That means they must send conscript soldiers to the border.
But because conscripts serve for only one year, they cannot be deployed before their first six months of training, and then six months later, the next group must rotate in. That is why Russia's military leaders might have concluded that they need to force or trick conscripts into signing on for longer stints.