Putin will soon order a full mobilisation. This may be his 'Boys in Zinc' moment

 If, as widely expected, Vladimir Putin orders a general mobilisation after September’s fake elections in Russia, he may discover that he is not simply rounding up another 300,000 men to send to his failing war in Ukraine. He could be mobilising the very people who eventually bring it to an end.

Could this become Putin’s “Boys in Zinc” moment?

The phrase has a grim resonance in Russia. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, dead Russian soldiers, mostly young conscripts, were sent home in zinc coffins. Russian soldiers’ mothers marched on the Kremlin demanding their sons be brought home. After roughly 18,000 Soviet troops had been killed, the political pressure became impossible to ignore. The Red Army eventually withdrew in 1989.

That same year a book came out titled Boys in Zinc (sometimes translated as Zinky Boys) by the writer Svetlana Alexievich, documenting the war and its effects. It caused a huge internal debate. The zinc coffins coming back from Afghanistan and the grief and rage they engendered were a significant factor not only in the end of the war but the fall of the Soviet Union.

So why, after what Ukraine claims is a staggering 1.5 million Russian casualties, has there been comparatively little public revolt this time?

The answer may lie in who is doing the dying. Putin has, for much of this war, been able to avoid sending ethnic-Russian conscripts to the war against their will. The Russian Army has been replenished with prisoners, mercenaries, ethnic minorities and men from poorer regions, attracted by salaries that are extraordinary by Russian standards or by the promise of freedom from prison.

To the Moscow and St Petersburg elite, these men are, brutally, expendable. Their own sons are not sent to Ukraine unless they choose to volunteer, and even then they are likely to be found safe postings.

The propaganda machine reinforces the illusion. Back home, the Russian soldier is portrayed as the heroic “internationalist fighter”, liberating Ukraine and supposedly securing a brighter future for its people. It is a grotesque inversion of reality. On the front, there is little that is heroic about the experience.

Hunger, cold, fear and the constant prospect of death are the daily currency. Soldiers are frequently poorly equipped and inadequately supplied. Corruption is rife. Discipline and punishment are murderous and unfair. Alcohol and drugs become a means of coping with the unbearable. Some resort to deliberately mutilating themselves simply to escape the battlefield.

This is not an army marching confidently towards victory. It is a meat grinder consuming young men at an industrial rate.

But a general mobilisation of 300,000 or more could change the political equation dramatically. For the first time, the war could begin reaching deep into the comfortable homes of western Russia’s middle classes. Suddenly it may not be some Chechen or Tatar mother’s son – or a criminal released from prison, or a foreign mercenary – being sent to die in the Donbas. It could be their sons.

Of course, Putin will attempt to shield the oligarchs and those closest to the Kremlin. That is how authoritarian systems work. But they are not the only people with something to lose. The urban middle classes have money, influence and, crucially, access to the wider world. They know that Russia’s economy is struggling, that their country has become a pariah in much of the West and that now their sons may soon be expected to die for a war whose objectives become less credible by the day. That is where the real danger for Putin lies.

And even if he succeeds in herding another 300,000 men into uniform, numbers alone will not win this war. An army needs properly trained soldiers, competent officers, modern equipment and time to prepare. Russia has already hollowed out much of its training establishment to feed the front. Experienced instructors have themselves been consumed by the war. Recruits have reportedly received only rudimentary preparation before being thrown into combat.

Putin therefore faces a stark choice: continue feeding the meat grinder or admit that his “special military operation” has failed. His increasingly shrill rhetoric towards Britain and other European supporters of Ukraine suggests a Kremlin growing frustrated by the battlefield and desperate to break Western resolve. Putin appears to believe that if he can simply outlast Ukraine and its allies, victory will somehow emerge from exhaustion.

We must not let him. Britain, France and our European allies should ignore the bluster and concentrate on the one thing that matters: keeping Ukraine armed, supplied and capable of fighting. Putin’s threats are designed to frighten us into doing precisely the opposite.

The irony is that the forthcoming Russian mobilisation may ultimately weaken rather than strengthen him. The new “Zinky Boys” will not necessarily come from the poorest corners of Russia or from prison cells. They could come from the very families that have, until now, been protected from the consequences of Putin’s folly.