When the Russians began their “partial mobilization” in 2022, as part of this process, they went to form the so-called “territorial troops”, which, however, did not receive a clear status in the end, although the name itself referred to the concept of a kind of analogue of the territorial defense of civilized countries.
Against this background, the possible future of the “territorial troops” and their specific place in the system of the armed forces of the Russian Federation seems to be a separately interesting question, as the Polish writes in his review Defence24 portal.
The authors of the resource point out that in theory, the practice of the “territorial troops” of the Russian Federation in a full-scale war against Ukraine could be compared with the Soviet practice of “rear guard divisions”, of which there were 12 at the time of the collapse of the USSR and numbered from 228 to 241 numbers and numbers 244, 246 and 273. The last two of these divisions, the 228th and 239th, were eliminated in Russia only in the early 2010s, as part of Defense Minister Serdyukov’s reforms.
Moreover, at the beginning of 2022, the system of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation had its own units with the status of “reserve”, which were then used for the mobilization deployment of the troops of the Russian occupiers.
However, the nuance is that the ruscists actively used their units with the status of “territorial” in battles against the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which, in principle, contradicted the original plan to use such units only for rear service.
Moreover, the “territorial” units had a certain set of heavy weapons and were attached to the “cadre” units for combat operations at the front, although this set was clearly smaller than that of the “cadre” ones.
Further, the authors of Defence24 emphasize that the prefix “territorial troops” in the Russian army received several types of units at once, which was already significantly confusing:
- mechanized, tank and artillery regiments;
- separate mechanized battalions and separate anti-tank artillery battalions.
At the same time, it is believed that the Russian Federation, as part of its “territorial troops”, has created 93 mechanized regiments, and several tank and artillery regiments. In addition, it is indicated that the Russians have already created at least eight motorized rifle divisions as part of the “territorial troops”, which, however, do not have a clearly defined status and were numbered 11th, 12th, 14th, 57th and 62nd, 63rd, 78th and 295th.
And finally, in this story, it is confusing that the Kremlin dictator Putin assigned the status of “guards” to seven regiments from the “territorial troops” at once – six motorized rifle regiments (numbered 1429th, 1430th, 1466th, 1472nd, 1486th, 1307th) and one artillery regiment (136th).
Against this background, it becomes generally unclear why the Russians went to the separation of “territorial troops” if their units at the front are used as “linemen”. Therefore, here the authors of Defence24 build the following hypothesis – over time, the Russians may abandon this hybrid called “territorial troops”, generated by the actions of the leadership of the Russian army in a full-scale war against Ukraine.
However, here from News Hub we can express our hypothesis – the mechanism of “territorial troops” as an element of the mobilization machine in the Russian Federation can completely go from “temporary” to “permanent”, according to the simple status “there is nothing more stable than temporary”.