Embarrassing as it may look at first reading, it’s probably necessary. I think the purpose is to recall retired officers to lead the new mobilized or Storm Z units. I had also read that Russian military academies are cutting the length of courses for young aspiring officers by 2 months in order to send as many lieutenants as possible to the front.

The problem of officers also exists in Ukraine, perhaps even more so, which is calling into service retired officers, including those who served as reserve officers during their time as conscript university students in the late Red Army. It has been written on quite a lot of instances, including by UAF soldiers, about the dichotomy between young Ukrainian officers trained after 2014 looking towards the Western model and the older ones trained on Soviet manuals and retaining the “Soviet mentality”… Probably to a large extent this dichotomy is true, but there is no realistic alternative at the moment.

Generally speaking, when in times of war and general mobilization a country’s armed forces grow X times in size, officers are the first thing to be in shortage.