What Is Wrong with Putin's Army? Part Five.
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The Kremlin's decision to practically run down the conscription army and replace it with a professional army was justified in many ways. However, there is one feature that separates the Russian professional army from its Western counterparts: rampant corruption.
It would not have been possible to end up in a different situation, considering the development path of the Russian army, which I have discussed in previous updates. Already the conscription army was corrupt and when the professional army was built into it, its foundation was a quagmire.
When Russia started to get rich with oil revenue, Putin channeled huge amounts of money into the professional army. In fact, in the 2010s, Russia spent a larger share of its national income on military than any other country. And when you pour money into an already corrupt system, it's like pouring gasoline into the flames.
Everyone rushed to get their share of the armed forces spending at every step in the chain of command. At the highest level, the Minister of Defense had numerous yachts, the generals had huge villas, the major had a nice car and could afford nice shopping trips in Finland with their family. At the lowest level of the system, the contract soldier Vasiliy took the sneakers from the feet of the unfortunate conscript Oleg and told him to ask his mother for new ones.
Everyone has probably heard that corruption is destructive in the armed forces, but it may be difficult for Finns to understand why it is so destructive. We easily think of corruption as some kind of loss or tax. However, its effects are much worse than its face value.
As a theoretical example, suppose that corruption is 10% and an army unit orders ten tanks. But since there is that 10% corruption, do they only get nine tanks? No. The unit does get the ten tanks it ordered, but all of them are missing 10% of the things they should have.
When the tanks start moving, one won't start at all because the fuel has been sold. One's radio device turns out to be just an empty shell. The third's reactive armor is filled with styrofoam. And all have military-standard optics replaced with cheap Chinese consumer products. Instead of nine usable tanks, the unit gets ten more or less usable ones. And no one knows to what degree they are usable.
In a corrupt system, things do not disappear from places that make sense from the point of view of the whole, but from where they can be stolen at any given time. Unpredictable and often destructive.
Furthermore, systemic corruption is like a black hole that absorbs value. You have to remember that corruption is illegal, so the appropriated goods are basically stolen. And thus much lower in value than legitimate stuff.
It follows that when the contract soldier Vasiliy steals the army's night vision binoculars and exchanges them for a couple of bottles of Putinka vodka, quite a few rubles from Putin's defense budget evaporate. I won't try to find out how much it costs to manufacture night vision binoculars in Russia, but I'm betting that it's quite a lot more than a couple of bottles of vodka. But since the vodka peddler knows that Vasiliy has stolen the binoculars from the army, he has no reason to pay more.
After which, another contract soldier, Pavel, unexpectedly finds himself in Ukraine with his tank. In the pitch-black night, he can see movement in the bushes, but Pavel doesn't have night vision equipment because Vasiliy had stolen them. Pavel has to watch with his naked eyes what is happening there, and of course he can't see anything. Well, the Ukrainian corporal Serhii with NATO night vision equipment and an NLAW under his arm is there in the bushes. That's the end of Pavel and his tank.
So what exactly happened to value? A T-72 tank costs from half a million to a couple of million dollars, depending on the model and the time of manufacture. This value turned into a couple of bottles of vodka, which have also already been emptied. You can probably get an idea why Russia's huge defense budget turns into a military capability with very low efficiency.
In addition to losing value, corruption also eats away at the morale of the troops. The private soldiers understood the connection between things very well. They were supposed to get, for example, new combat vests, but they got old leather straps smelling of storage grease which still have the Soviet coat of arms on them. At the same time, the captain replaced his car with a newer one and the colonel ordered a new sauna for his summer house. This is not conducive to building trust between the enlisted and the officers. And it makes sure that the privates themselves steal whenever they can.
At this point, of course, the question arises, why didn't Putin stop the destructive corruption of the armed forces?
The answer is that in Putin's Russia, corruption is not a cancer within the system, but corruption itself is the system. And that's exactly how Putin wants Russia to be.
So it is not that Putin has failed in his fight against corruption, but that he has never seen a problem with it. He has fully blessed the system, where official status comes with a permission to snatch your share of resources and this principle extends from lower-level officials to the Kremlin's elite.
That is no coincidence. Putin has systematically removed all institutions that curb corruption. The free media, which acts as the watchdog of political power, has been effectively silenced, and there is nothing left of the independence of the justice system. Moreover, the justice system has been subjugated as a tool of the Kremlin whose mission is to protect corruption. That became clear even to the dumbest in November 2009 at the latest, after the so-called Magnitsky case.
Sergei Magnitsky was a straight-up accountant who stuck to the principles of the rule of law even when there was nothing left of the rule of law. In court, he defended his client, a British investment fund, whose holdings were being hijacked by parties close to the Kremlin. Magnitsky pursued the case tenaciously and skillfully in court, even though he had no chance of winning in the thoroughly politicized Russian legal system. At the same time, he exposed the corruption of those in power with the help of public sources.
As a result, the Kremlin made Magnitsky a cautionary example. It is pointless to seek protection from the justice system if you challenge those in power. Magnitsky was arrested on completely made-up charges and thrown into prison. There, the unyielding accountant was brutally beaten and denied medical treatment. He eventually died of a heart attack while being handled by the guards.
Magnitsky's fate caused an uproar abroad and even a number of US sanctions were named after him. But the Kremlin made sure the message got through. Even after his death, Magnitsky was sued for tax fraud (!). Taking a dead person to court was something that had not been seen even in Stalin's time.
The results of Putin's policy of personally protecting corruption have been in line with expectations. You could imagine that during his long reign the situation would have improved compared to the chaos of the 1990s - but the situation is exactly the opposite.
Despite the economic and administrative development, Putin's Russia is more corrupt than Yeltsin's Russia. Measured by Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, Russia's corruption ranking among 180 countries in 2021 was a dreadful 136.
Corruption is thus part of the DNA of Putin's regime, and a significant institution like the armed forces could not even in principle be outside of it. After all, corruption is an essential tool with which Putin rules. It's a way to reward loyalty and also punish for failure. It is illegal in principle, but since everyone is involved in it, anyone can be punished at any time.
If someone angers the Kremlin's autocrat, their corporate headquarters is suddenly full of tax inspectors and criminal investigators. Ambiguities (both real and fake) result in a flurry of accusations in a Kafkaesque (quite literally) legal system, and ones wealthy upper-class life can end and you can find yourself an imprisoned pauper in just a few weeks. Putin shares power and wealth, but he can also take it away.
It is easy to understand what this climate of fear does to trust in between people. Even in the armed forces, everyone benefits from corruption, but everyone also has to watch out for each other. When settling mutual grudges and power struggles in between different factions, accusations of corruption are a useful weapon. After all, everyone is guilty of something and everyone knows it.
This is the systemic corruption of the Russian army in all its misery. It destroys predictability, it destroys value, it destroys morale and, most of all, it destroys all trust. And it can never be removed from the system, because in Putin's Russia it is the system.
Re: Russia, US, Ukraine, and the Future
Originally Posted by Laser101
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