The mobilization of the Russian population, which has been recently announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin, will not affect the course of the war in Ukraine in the current 2022, and probably will not have a significant impact on the ability of the Russian Federation to conduct it in the next, 2023, according to a report by analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

According to analysts, this is due to the presence of "fundamental structural challenges" in the Russian Federation, which the Russian leadership is unlikely to be able to overcome in the coming months, and possibly years.

The Institute notes that the actions of Russian President Putin indicate that he is “far more concerned with rushing bodies to the battlefield than with addressing these fundamental flaws.”

In addition, it is clarified that the mobilization will allow the Russian Federation to create additional forces, but this will happen ineffectively and with large internal social and political costs.

“The forces generated by this ‘partial mobilization,’ critically, are very unlikely to add substantially to the Russian military’s net combat power in 2022. Putin will have to fix basic flaws in the Russian military personnel and equipment systems if mobilization is to have any significant impact even in the longer term,” experts say.

They note that the Russian army has not created conditions for effective large-scale mobilization since at least 2008 and has not created reserve forces necessary for sudden mobilization intended for immediate impact on the battlefield. “There are no rapid solutions to these problems,” the Institute notes.

They add that the Russian military tried to switch to a fully professional contract army in the conditions of the 2008 financial crisis, but were never able to fully implement the transition, which led to the creation of a hybrid model in which conscripts and professional soldiers mixed.

At the same time, the reduction of the mandatory service life from two years to one year made the Russian reserves less combat-ready.

“Russia will mobilize reservists for this conflict. The process will be ugly, the quality of the reservists poor, and their motivation to fight likely even worse. But the systems are sufficiently in place to allow military commissars and other Russian officials to find people and send them to training units and thence to war,” the ISW said.

The Institute clarifies that the poor quality of the voluntary reserve units created by the efforts of the BARS and volunteer battalions is probably already “a reliable indicator of the net increase in combat power Russia can expect to generate in this way.”

“This mobilization will not affect the course of the conflict in 2022 and may not have a very dramatic impact on Russia’s ability to sustain its current level of effort into 2023. The problems undermining Putin’s effort to mobilize his people to fight, finally, are so deep and fundamental that he cannot likely fix them in the coming months — and possibly for years. Putin is likely coming up against the hard limits of Russia’s ability to fight a large-scale war,” the Institute concluded.