Succes schreef op 30 april 2023 17:20:
How Russian Corruption Is Foiling Putin’s Army in Ukraine
Though Ukraine has fielded a remarkable defense, another deadly battlefield foe has emerged for Putin: endemic corruption and graft from top to bottom of the Russian army.
When Russia moved 85% of all of its land forces toward and into Ukraine to break the stubborn and unforeseen local resistance, one thing became obvious: the move yielded a fighting force far smaller than the assessments of the country’s vaunted million-man army.
The Kremlin previously stated it could field a total of 900,000 active duty troops, with Russian President Vladimir Putin now calling on his military to grow by 10% as a tacit admission of the problems it faces in its war in Ukraine. Questionable organizational decisions in the Russian military and a series of misguided political assumptions hampered the fighting force from the outset.
But those missteps are inflamed by widespread corruption within the Russian military, officials and analysts say, such as common practices among recruiters of overstating the number of enlistees they say they signed up to skim funding for the difference. The Pentagon now believes Russian dysfunction will prevent it from reaching even its recruitment goals from before the invasion, let alone expand its military to more than 1 million troops.
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The U.S. military assesses that as many as a third of deployed Russian vehicles have failed on their own, due in large part to unenforced maintenance practices at their home bases. Reports have emerged that its troops are eating expired rations, likely because logisticians either sold the replacements or never used dispersed money to buy them in the first place.
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“Russia’s geopolitical power is an existential matter for Putin – the one thing he truly cares about more than any other,” Robert Person, a professor of international relations at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, says, speaking in a personal capacity. “And yet the individuals in Russia’s military-defense complex are just as greedy as those throughout the rest of the government bureaucracy. Why should they be denied their corruption-funded comforts just because they are engaged in national defense?”
“And so the skimming, stealing, and misallocation of money, equipment, supplies, and other resources flourishes throughout the military as everyone seeks to take their cut. But unlike the civilian sectors, this theft cannot be admitted openly within the ‘power vertical.’ Robbing Russia’s national defense is not tolerated in the way that it would be – or even encouraged – in civilian heavy industry,” Person says. “So they do what generations of Soviet officers and defense bureaucrats did for decades before them: lie up the chain. Lie about the readiness of their troops and equipment, lie about how the budget is being spent – all to cover up the scale of their theft.
“And because Putin has constructed a personalist dictatorship where everyone around him is dependent on him for their wealth, power and even freedom, he will never hear the truth about how corrupt his military is and how badly they are likely to perform as a result.”
Putin and his advisers seriously overestimated military capabilities and manpower as a result, Person adds, leading to “a strategically disastrous miscalculation to launch a war that they were not equipped to win.”
“And so I would say that corruption in the military and the entire political system go a long way in explaining Putin’s miscalculation in invading Ukraine.”
Putin has not offered any indications this cycle of corruption will change, certainly not as the Russian military accepts his orders to expand in an attempt to offset its battlefield failures thus far.
Any expansion there, however, will likely only take place on paper. And it remains unclear whether Putin himself will realize it.
“Based on what I’ve seen studying him and his regime for the last 22 years,” Person concludes, “my guess is that he will believe his own propaganda until the end.”
www.usnews.com/news/world-report/arti...