Russia and Ukraine
What Russia's trying to avoid, I think in the short term, is broader mass mobilisation from Russia proper, because this was so unpopular in 2022 where they called it a partial mobilisation, but the semantics of it doesn't really matter. It was very damaging for Putin and his party, and Putin's party has parliamentary elections coming up in September of this year. This is the first election that they've had since the war began and it's a real sort of reputational test of how the party is doing given the pressures on the economy and given the war. So what they really want to avoid is taking significant numbers of soldiers from places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg."
