September mobilization newsletter

270,000 lost or stolen weapons. 200 anti-military arson cases. 400,000 emigrants in 2024. $37 thousand to dodge the draft. Deaths and violence. Mobilization minivans and electronic warfare.

When the Kursk operation was launched at the start of August, Ukrainian militarists were ecstatic. As usual, one favorite analogy was to Israel - parliamentarian Roman Kostenko from the Holos party said back in August that the Kursk operation, like Israel’s wars, showed that Ukraine had geopolitical agency and was willing to ignore the advice of its ‘western partners’.

This foreign PR goal was obvious. But no less important was the domestic PR aspect. The military analysts of Ukrainska Pravda (UP), the premier atlanticist-sorosite publication, balanced their wariness about the strategic benefit of the Kursk operation with fevered recollection of the ecstasy at the frontline in the first days of the operation. ‘Finally, we’re on the offensive and not just pulling back. All the top officers say that simply defending and losing initiative means we fight and lose the war on Russia’s terms’.

And spirits weren’t only lifted at the frontline. All the military analysts noted with relief that Kursk lifted the ‘record-low societal morale’. No more stories about mobilization minibuses, as on UP journalist said.

Obviously, opening up yet another front certainly doesn’t reduce the need to mobilize more men. Syrsky stated on September 5 that one of the army’s main tasks now is to mobilize more people. On September 6, he admitted that there are problems with the amount of training given - showing that the flow of mobilization isn’t fast enough to give decent training, a major problem that I’ll go into in more detail in an upcoming post.

So the minibuses certainly haven’t slowed down. And as the euphoria about Kursk cools down, it is becoming harder to divert attention from the other war - the mobilization war.

Violence

Two pieces of news best illustrate the ruthless militarization of the ‘home front’.

First - the head of the Kyiv police stated on September 14 that there have been over 200 cases of arson against military vehicles. A quarter were committed by minors. The arsonists were reportedly promised 600 to several thousand USD - several months salary for most Ukrainians. But also hardly sufficient to justify the risk of 8 years and up in Ukraine’s special prisons for ‘collaborationists’. Prisons especially infamous for torture, as a recent strana.ua investigation analyzed (see this article of mine for the systematic torture for extortion purposes endemic to all Ukrainian prisons). Any cost-benefit analysis shows there are clearly there are non-financial motivations at stake.

A military vehicle set alight in Odessa in early September

A look inside the mobilization minibuses that are so often the target of arsonists gives some clues as to motivations. A parliamentarian said on September 6 that TSK (mobilization) officers coat their vehicles with electronic warfare devices to prevent the mobilized from calling family members or lawyers once they’ve been abducted. This electronic warfare technology, known as ‘REB’ in Ukrainian/Russian, is the current obsession among frontline drone warriors, with both armies competing to develop new REB capable of downing enemy drones, and new drones capable of overcoming enemy REB. Perhaps soon we’ll see drones themselves cornering civilians trying to escape the mobilization minibuses.