Kevin Tracy
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2022-10-09
Russian Civilian & Intelligence Failures to Blame, but Generals Continue to Bear the Brunt of the Criticism
As long as there are generals to fire, Vladimir Putin appears to be safe from widespread criticism for the failure of the Russian war effort in Ukraine. We were talking about Putin firing generals back in early August. To Russia's credit, it looks as though they've changed some parts of their strategy because generals were being killed in action at a rate of 2 per month back then. Since August 8th, so far as I'm aware, no additional Russian generals have been killed by Ukrainian forces or rebellion behind their own lines. That does not mean the Russian generals are safe, though. Now, their greatest threat seems to be purely political as the civilian leadership in Moscow and their war hawk supporters in the blogosphere and in state media are struggling to find people to blame for Russia's embarrassing military failures.
To some degree, they are right. Military generals have been the problem as the problems of graft, corruption, drug abuse, the lack of discipline, and poor training have been present since before the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian military should be one of the most mighty in the world, but poor leadership has resulted in the weakening of the Russian military. Another apparent problem for the Russians is lack of relevant experience. If you look at the conflicts the Russian Federation have been involved with since the collapse of the iron curtain, we see a variety of small scale, asymmetric wars featuring opponents armed largely with aging Soviet-era weapons the military had familiarity with and understood the shortcomings of. The Chechen Wars, the invasion of Georgia (which had an utterly incompetent leader in Mikheil Saakashvili), the surprise invasion of Crimea, and the military aide of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Russian military has not faced a well-armed, modern opponent since Nazi Germany in World War II.
Unlike the US military; which trains to counter the most recent weapon systems of the Russians, Chinese, Europeans, and even their own; the Russian military has spent the past 40 years (since their failed invasion of Afghanistan) cutting their teeth on smaller, weaker opponents.
That's not to say the civilian leadership does not share the blame. The problems within the Russian military have been known around the world since major Russian weapon systems started finding their way onto the black market after the fall of the Soviet Union. The world has known that Russian generals were guilty of all forms of corruption since then, too. The Russian government has cooperated with the UN for years in describing the Russian drug and opioid crisis in detail and it shouldn't be a surprise that so many soldiers have a drug problem. Especially when drug testing is a joke at best and completely non-existent at worst. If soldiers are openly engaging in drug use and immoral behavior on social media, it shouldn't be a surprise that discipline is virtually non-existent when those soldiers are thrown into combat. The United States saw this first hand working with drugged-out Afghan National Army soldiers during Operation Enduring Freedom and how quickly the Afghans surrendered their positions and multi-million dollar equipment at first sight of the Taliban; just like Russians are abandoning tanks, firearms, artillery, vehicles, and all kinds of ammunition at first sight of the Ukrainian Army.
There is no way that Russian military and state intelligence is so pathetic that their failed to recognize the Ukrainian military was training with US and NATO forces every day since the invasion of Crimea in March 2014. In addition to training with US and NATO soldiers, the Ukrainian military was stockpiling US-manufactured anti-tank missiles, artillery, supplies, and everything they would need to stop an all-out invasion of Ukraine from the Russian Federation. Russian intelligence agencies needed only to open a foreign newspaper or do a Google search to find out what was happening. Even if they couldn't do those things, any intelligence analyst worth their weight in dirt should have been able to predict this would be the outcome of the Russian annexation of Crimea.
This war should have been so ill-advised (at least in 2022) that all but the most juvenile of Russia's war hawks should have been opposed to it. Their failure to recognize the obvious problems right in front of their noses is indicative of the downside of the popular cult of Putin that has developed in Russia. Through clever manipulations of information and foreign politics, Putin had managed to make Russia perceive itself as a global superpower surpassing even the strength of the Soviet Union and rivaling that of the United States and China today, even without the use of nuclear weapons.
This self-perception of themselves as a renewed super power was only further reinforced by the successful outcomes in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria.
Now, confronted with a series of failures, the Russian political leaders are desperate to blame the military leaders because it ignores the blame they themselves deserve. The military leaders, fearful of the consequences of speaking out, are silent. However, they and the rest of the world know this isn't just an embarrassing indictment of the Russian military, it's an indictment of the United Russia political coalition and the entirety of the Russian Federation.
