Another Shocker: WSJ Reveals Russia Arming Massive New Rear Reserve Force

A new Wall Street Journal article has the conflict analysis world gibbering:

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-military-nato-europe-finland-ff53b912

In alarmist fashion it describes a putative ‘build up’ of Russian military strength on NATO’s northeastern flank:

The article hammers home that Russia has been vastly expanding its arms production and army’s general strength, contrary to the lower-tier propaganda fed to the masses about a collapsing Russian Armed Forces:

Production of artillery cannons and munitions is expected to rise by around 20% this year, and drone quality and production have increased significantly.

“The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”

The most eye-opening direct statement from the article:

Russia’s recent production of military equipment has more than made up for what it is losing in Ukraine.

Is that so?

But the most instructive part came as a direct vindication of something I’ve been writing here for a long time—that a large portion of Russian regeneration of both manpower and materiel has been going toward standing up reserve army corps in the rear, which Shoigu had announced as far back as 2023:

In 2021, before the invasion, Russia made about 40 of its main battle tanks, the T-90M, according to Western intelligence estimates. Now it is producing nearly 300 a year. A senior Finnish military official said almost none are being sent to the front line in Ukraine, but are staying on Russian soil for later use.

Read the bolded portion above again.

So, Russia is reportedly producing 300 T-90Ms and sending virtually all of them to the newly-constituted rear reserve units. This vindicates those readers who’ve long suspected that Russia was “holding back the best stuff” and using lower tier gear on the active front. I myself was admittedly not a particular devotee of that line of reasoning, but it seems even I may have been wrong on that count. It certainly would explain the lack of recent sightings of T-90Ms, BMPT Terminators, and other such ‘fancy’ gear on the front—Russia would apparently rather save the good stuff for a clash against NATO itself.

Some have even noted the reappearance of proper tank columns to the 2025 Red Square parade—seen here in rehearsal:

Last year famously featured a minimalist ensemble led by relic T-34s.

Granted, critics can argue with good reason that this would constitute a kind of betrayal of priorities and current troops dying on the frontline in ‘armored Bukhankas’, motorcycles, etc. But I think this topic is far more nuanced and would require a much longer tactical exegesis on its own, perhaps in an upcoming article. The gist would be the following: it’s not so much that Russia doesn’t value the lives of current frontline grunts, but simply that Russia’s present strategy of advancement comes as a direct response to Ukraine’s own chosen defense philosophy.

You see, more and more we hear Ukrainian officials and military experts themselves echo what the pro-UA OSINT community has been warbling for a while now: that Ukraine is shifting almost entirely to a drone-centric defense strategy. A recent claimed Ukrainian POW statement highlights this:

Starshe Edda: Recently, an AFU soldier who was captured on the Krasnoyaruzhsk direction said:

You are receiving 2 Kamaz [trucks] of soldiers, while we are receiving 2 Kamaz [trucks] of drones. Of course, his phrase is somewhat exaggerated, but in general it makes sense. The era of drones has introduced such a thing in military tactics, which led to the fact that in defense, that in the offensive, the presence of manpower minimized. A company stronghold is defended by a squad, at most a platoon. Drones relentlessly attack defensive lines and in fact they (engineering structures) have lost very significantly in the quality of their original intent. Now the basis is not powerful ramparts and slabs, but maximum camouflage, even at the expense of protective functions. The soldier often sits in a simple burrow, without heating, in order to maximize camouflage. Once the location of a shelter with a live force inside has been compromised, it will be sprayed with a variety of drones, from kamikazes to [VOG grenade] drops.

As such, in this type of shifting tactical environment, Russian commanders have begun favoring small, fast, expendable civilian vehicles. Certainly vehicular shortages do play a part to an extent—but it’s not the whole story.

A Russian supply line seen today:

Note the vast amount of bikes at the front of the ‘column’. They could have easily fit those same people into a Bukhanka of some kind, but they often choose to “disperse” on single-man bikes instead, because when drones come buzzing, there’s better chance of individual survival when the entire infantry squad can scatter in different directions on their own swift, easily-jettisoned motorbikes.

But this in no way completely obviates the need for Russia to mass-produce better infantry carriers as well, it’s simply a contextualization of the nuances of this changing face of war.

Getting back to the WSJ article:

The article notes that brigades stationed in the Leningrad district and outlying areas will triple in size:

Most of the manpower expansion will take place in the Leningrad district, which faces Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Smaller brigades will nearly triple in size to become divisions of around 10,000 troops, according to Western military and intelligence officials.

Satellite images in 2022 and 2025 of Russia's Kamenka military base near the border with Finland. The recent image shows new troop housing, according to investigators at Finnish research organization Black Bird Group.Planet Labs PBC

This is part and parcel to the reserves growth mentioned earlier. And to drive home the point, they lay the next bombshell—that Russian recruitment has swelled higher than ever. In particular, pay attention to the bolded centerpiece below:

The U.S. estimates that around 30,000 Russians are signing up each month, up from about 25,000 last summer. Some Eastern European intelligence officials say the ranks are now swelling by some 40,000 soldiers a month.

The extra manpower has allowed the military to rotate new troops in and out of Ukraine, and to build new units trained and housed in Russia, according to some European intelligence assessments.

So, not only do they confirm that Russia is regenerating 30,000 men per month, and even 40,000 according to some sources, but the biggest bombshell of all is made which fully redeems my reporting over the past year and a half: Russia is siphoning some of the newly recruited troops into new units stationed in the rear of Russia proper; i.e. reserves.

This should once and for all conclusively put to bed theories around where the Russian 30k+ monthly troops are going: a portion is replenishing hard losses, a portion replacing contract non-renewals, and a portion is going directly to the rear to stand up new armies meant to prepare Russia for a much bigger clash against NATO proper.

It could very well be 10k/10k/10k for each of the above categories. I believe more than ever Russians are incentivized to join on short contracts simply to collect the massive signing bonuses, but after 6 months to a year at most—if they survive—they complete the contract and go back home with pockets stuffed full of cash. These need to be constantly replenished with new faces—recall that only the original 300k mobilized from September 2022 were decreed to fight to the end with no ‘official’ demobilization, the remainder of the hundreds of thousands who’ve signed up since then have all done so on contracts either at the 6 month, 1 year, or 2 year terms—and I would not be surprised if 6 months is the most popular.

Russia is tailoring its rearmament plans to meet the needs of the new troops to be stationed along its NATO border. Those units will get much of the new equipment. Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms.

Well, well, well.

Now in light of the above, it is interesting that Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Syrsky announced today that Russia has brought reserves and increased intensity of operations in the Pokrovsk direction. A top Ukrainian analyst writes that the interfluve between the Solona and Vovcha rivers sees Ukrainian defenses under tremendous strain and cracking; this is precisely the bulge southwest of Pokrovsk.

Not only is Russia slated to hold a ‘fearsome’ round of Zapad exercises in Belarus this year, mirroring the pre-war drills of 2022, but there are even speculative rumors—courtesy of Legitimny channel—that North Koreans will soon be brought into the fray on Ukrainian territory proper; and in much larger numbers at that:

"Our source reports that DPRK soldiers will take part in the war on Ukrainian territory (previously they fought only in the Kursk region) if Trump's peace case stalls.

The source points out that if the war escalates, then by the end of the year more than two hundred thousand North Korean soldiers will be fighting in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces using their own equipment.

Such an “infusion” threatens the collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defense.

That's why everyone is now saying that the Russians will most likely go to Sumy, which they will encircle. We have been hearing about this for a long time. Also, the Russians are now creating a buffer zone at the border, which forces Kiev to pull reserves from other parts of the front, simply to slow down the Russian advance.

The situation for the Ukrainian Armed Forces is very, very sad, although Syrsky and Zelensky are trying to tell you fairy tales.

All our sources are waiting for the X moment when everything will collapse at once. It can happen at any moment."

Take that with a giant grain of Yellow Sea salt, but nevertheless—things were always bound to get interesting in this most pivotal of years. Part of it, I believe, is meant to be a deliberate warning to the West not to try anything, vis-a-vis NATO troops in Ukraine. It is the North Korean Damocles sword which threatens to unleash a mass unified rebuff to any unauthorized Western troop deployments. After all, just today the comic barks of boots-on-ground advocates again made headlines:

https://www.thetimes.com/article/726e3154-c716-4ab0-ab9a-3e9a44df3921

Trump in the meantime is now increasingly changing his tune, accelerating the timeline from “Ukraine being taken in a few years” to “being crushed very shortly” in his latest statements:

https://kyivindependent.com/i-think-that-nation-will-be-crushed-very-shortly-trump-says-hes-saving-ukraine/

We’ll have to wait and see what happens in the next two weeks, as the US has given another ‘ultimatum’ that it will soon walk away from the conflict, reiterated today by the State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce:

Needless to say, given today’s new information from the WSJ, Russia is in no rush, and is methodically husbanding its forces in preparation for all future contingencies, as it dutifully rotates frontline troops while slowly grinding down the Ukrainian Armed Forces all along the front. North Korea has now provided a tangible backstop of additional forces which can be deployed at any time to thwart any Western tricks—as such, despite all Western attempts at spoiling, Russia remains in command of the wider geostrategic initiative of the conflict, while reducing Ukraine to few promising choices to escape the tightening boa constrictor.

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