In a sign that Russia’s casualties in Ukraine are mounting, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the country will mobilize 300,000 reservists to support its troops. Putin confirmed he promised to use all military means in Ukraine and was “not bluffing” when hinting that Moscow was prepared to use nuclear weapons. Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan says “throwing bodies” at the problem is a familiar Russian war strategy, but given its delicate demographics, could backfire with serious consequences:

Number one, this is the sort of the war the Russians know how to fight – just throw bodies after it. The Russians have always had a larger population than any of the countries they have gone to war with and so they’ve always tried to win by numbers. And when they have won, that’s usually how it has happened. Second, this isn’t a fundamental break. Yes, the Russians need these troops, and they need them badly. But when you’ve only had 150,000, in theater, and you’ve been fighting for six months, more or less nonstop, and your logistics have been a mess, 300,000 troops doesn’t turn the tide. It just means you’re going to be able to cycle in troops to replace the ones that have become exhausted.

So this doesn’t give the Russians fundamentally more troops in theater. It allows them to rotate troops through the theater and continue fighting the war and more or less the way that they have been now which is to say poorly.

Obviously, it’s still bad news for the Ukrainians. But ultimately, this is getting to one of the core issues that I’ve been talking about since the beginning. The Russian demographic is horrible, and between guts or massive increases in the death rate or massive decreases in the birth rate, or both because of World War One famines, World War Two, the Brezhnev mismanagement, the post cold war collapse, there are these deep gouges out of the population structure across the Russian system, with the deepest one in people aged roughly 15 to 30.

Because you’ve got a stacking up through the generations of bad things that happened in World War One and World War Two and post Cold War. That’s where all these troops are coming from. So we’ve already got about 200,000 men in theater who are in their 20s, we’re now adding another 300,000. And we’re starting to get to the point where the Russians just aren’t going to have any more men in that generation to throw at this at all. And I don’t know if you guys were aware, but people in their 20s are the ones who do have kids. So we’re taking what is already the most demographically fragile demographic, and putting them into an open-ended war, which makes it very difficult for them to father or raise children. This is potentially a country-killer.