iirc they have mobilized and built a reserve but mostly that's so they can rotate forces off the front which are so badly mauled by the kinds of tactics they are using so they need to reconstitute while the reserve is used

This means that they can't great like a massive new army for operations elsewhere, though they have expanded to allow operations in Sumy and Kharkhiv, but it does mean they can consistently maintain pressure on the front and not allow the Ukrainians to build reserves either

Right, that reserve is not meant to - and cannot - deploy whole hog as a unified operational element.

they could generate enough new forces to do that if they wanted using the same wasteful but effective strategy they are now but they're carefully balancing industry needs, political costs, deficit spending, and regime survivability. They have enough for what they think they need

They could do that in the sense that the resources do exist in-country to do that, but they cannot do it in the sense that it is seen as too large a political risk bsky.app/profile/opul...

That and they're very budget cautious, this is the first time they've significantly deviated spending from state revenues in 20 years and they're starting to really get into finance danger zones that they stayed ahead of for the first 3 years.

Isn't Russia full of ridiculously overbuilt military bases?

Like I understand "the front devours all available resources" as a thing that happens, but it doesn't seem like it's militarily optimal

The trade off of course is giving up the initiative, and going on the strategic defensive

As Prussian Daddy taught us, military considerations are subordinate to, and exist to serve, political ones. Putin needs the war to remain below the threshold at which it becomes inescapably intrusive and demanding upon his key constituencies, and that applies to economic resources as well as human.

Well, I still think that if you're going to fight a war this way, you shouldn't fight it at all

It's sort of a retconned strategy that was bootstrapped after the attempted Rick & Mortying of Kiev ("Let's go. In and Out. Twenty minute adventure") didnt work out, but they have convinced themselves they can outlast the decadent West in this slow burn, and in the meantime it has political benefits

The military bases are probably underbuilt, given a significant chunk of the Soviet Armed Forces was based in Eastern Europe, and so they left a lot of their military infrastructure behind when the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist.

That was a mass conscript army in a period when there were far fewer exemptions/other methods of avoidance than in the contemporary Russian army, so even the bases in Russia proper (and Crimea) were designed for way more servicemen than exist today.

A bunch of overbuild, decrepit Cold War era bases where 85% of the items of value were stripped and sold off during the 90s. You could hypothetically warehouse a mass mobilized army there, but good luck doing any RSOI

That too. Plus they don’t really know how to do brigade and higher level combined arms at all anymore.

My father-in-law is a VDV commander. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent war because he is lost in wonder. We were in Abkhazia together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to invade it today. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.'"