Irish Examiner view: Russia conscripts will pay a bloody price

'Annexation of Ukrainian provinces moves the war into an escalated, problematic, quasi-legal status.' Picture: Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP

In the Battle of Stalingrad, 80 years ago this autumn, the Russians adopted a novel form of punishment for backsliders in their ranks. 

Soldiers deemed to have shown insufficient resilience in the face of the enemy were organised into penal battalions, or shtrafniki. 

Often denied the benefits of snow camouflage, or weapons, and sometimes with their arms tied behind them, they were driven towards the German Wehrmacht positions, to draw fire, or to assist the passage through minefields for the Red Army’s regular troops.

Attachment to a punishment squad was tantamount to a death sentence. And that, no doubt, is how many conscripts now see their enforced recruitment to swell the ranks of Vladimir Putin’s faltering operation in Ukraine. 

That is why so many are fleeing Mother Russia recalling to mind John F Kennedy’s famous speech in West Berlin in 1963: “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” 

American President John F Kennedy at Cork City Hall with Lord Mayor Sean Casey during his visit to the city in 1963.

While the sham referenda, conducted in some cases under the guns of occupying soldiers, have proclaimed “large majorities” in favour of annexation of four regions — Zaporizhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk — by Moscow not one of the western democracies will accept the results. Meanwhile Ukraine, which is now harbouring hopes of further military victories, will never do so.

If they come, it will be at the cost of raw and untrained troops swept up from streets, mainly in regions which used to form part of the Russian Federation and thrown forward to boost regulars and misnamed separatist “people’s militias” of the kind involved in shooting down Flight MH17 from Schipol to Malaysia in 2016 with a Buk missile.

As autumn moves towards winter, both sides will be determined to gain, or not lose, ground. As Putin purports to be a student of history, he may remember that the German invasion of Russia — Operation Barbarossa — failed because of overstretched supply lines, superior weaponry in the prevailing conditions, manpower problems and an indomitable refusal to surrender by an invaded people.

Annexation of Ukrainian provinces moves the war into an escalated, problematic, quasi-legal status where the Kremlin may either present an attack on them as an attack on itself, or use them as a bargaining counter in any future negotiations.

In any event, in the bloodshed to come, it will be those Russian citizens press ganged into the ranks who pay the price. They were not there to watch the planned celebratory spectacle in Red Square last night. They are spending their time trying to learn one end of a rifle from another.