October 28, 2024:
The United States has imposed more sanctions on Russia every month since Russia seized Crimea and portions of two other provinces in 2014. The sanctions increased substantially when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Eventually the Americans asked, then demanded, that nations like Turkey, Qatar, the UAE and China cease tolerating Russian efforts to evade the sanctions. The United States can retaliate by imposing sanctions on those that persist in aiding Russia.
Russia has been using financial incentives to encourage countries to assist in evading the sanctions. This is one reason the UN has been quick to support the sanctions. Another is that international agreements that created the UN included protections for national sovereignty. The only supporters Ukraine has in the UN are a few other outlaw states like North Korea, Iran and Cuba. None of these nations have strong economies and all have been subject to sanctions for over fifty years. Russia does not want to join that club, but as long as Russia continues to occupy Ukrainian territory, the sanctions will remain and get worse.
In addition to sanctions, Russia is also working on military reforms so that the next time Russian troops perform better and perhaps even win. There have been several rounds of unsuccessful military reforms since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. One of the major causes of that collapse was their unaffordable and largely ineffective armed forces. In post-Soviet Russia there were far fewer restrictions on criticizing the military. Most Russians had a very negative attitude towards conscription and the reforms underway because of the Ukraine War disaster are typical of several previous efforts to remedy problems that continue to resist any fundamental change. President Vladimir Putin ordered all these reform efforts and is dismayed that they failed. Putin never served in the military but joined the KGB secret police in 1975. Since then Putin did what he could to punish domestic enemies, especially those calling for actions against his corrupt officials.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the KGB became, after many reforms and dismissal of incompetent or disloyal personnel, the FSB (Federal Security Bureau). By 1998 Putin was head of the FSB. At this point Putin declared that communism was a failed doctrine and proposed that democracy replace it. Since he was elected the leader of Russia in 1999, Putin has worked hard to control the voting and the counting of votes so that he can stay in power.
The FSB reforms were still underway when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. The losses were heavier than expected and a new plan called for a massive training program to replace all the officers lost in the first few months of the 2022 fighting. The immediate problem was that all the officer instructors were sent to the front in March and April 2022 where they too became casualties.
Next was that military and political leaders are still unable to restore one crucial aspect of an improved military: NCOs, or Non-Commissioned Officers, sergeants in the army, petty officers in the navy. A century ago, Russia abandoned a long tradition of NCOs. Instead, junior officers would try to do everything NCOs handled. That never worked. Providing adequate training for new combat troops is something else that never had a high priority, and still doesn’t after nearly three years of war. The prewar reforms were supposed to change that. There have been similar efforts in the past and none have lasted long.
There is another serious problem that few want to discuss, corruption. Even in wartime, and especially during the Ukraine war, corruption was still a staggering problem. Officers and other government officials continued to put their own financial gain above the need to equip the troops with what they needed to survive and win. The difficulty here is that the military’s corruption is rooted in political corruption at the highest levels, with Putin and his cronies grabbing whatever they could for almost 20 years. This inevitably drifted downward until even supply sergeants routinely stole back and sold gear issued to new troops when they were outside their barracks just before leaving for the front. Russia is descending into a Third World state known as a resource kleptocracy, but run by a for-real gangster confederacy. Only with nuclear and biological weapons from before it fell apart. All this enthusiasm for military reform was thought to have been taken care of in 2022, on the eve to the invasion of Ukraine. As before, it was discovered that previous reforms had not worked, generally from not being implemented at all.
Those who had followed the history of failed efforts to reform the Russian army since the 1990s were not surprised at what happened to Russian troops when they encountered their Ukrainian counterparts. Before the invasion, most Russians believed that the Ukrainian troops were no match for Russian soldiers. Russians also found it hard to believe that the Ukrainians, who were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, had managed in less than a decade after Russia’s first invasion in 2014 to implement many fundamental reforms. Some of these reforms were far more ambitious than any Russia ever attempted. After a few months of fighting in Ukraine it was painfully obvious that Russian troops were no match for their Ukrainian adversaries. Before that, Russians believed that their dismal reform efforts had magically worked as nearly half their combat units assembled on the Ukrainian border.
Reports from the Russian capital, which Ukrainian military leaders believed, indicated the decision had been made to invade despite obvious defects in the training, morale and equipment of Russian units. The reality of the differences between Russian and Ukrainian forces was soon made clear as the advance was stopped short of its goals and suffered heavy casualties in the process. Copies of the attack plan, which were only distributed to a few senior commanders leading the attack, showed that the Russians believed they could quickly reach and take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and replace the government with a pro-Russian one and declare the war over. At that point the rest of Ukraine was supposed to surrender and get used to being Russian once more.
Many Russians, especially recent veterans or parents of sons approaching conscription age, knew the truth and were perplexed at the decision to invade when so many soldiers were poorly trained and suffering from low morale. Conscripts supposedly prohibited by law from service in a war zone were sent in anyway.
Much of the Russian population continues to cope with the continuing use of conscription, something that has been unpopular since the end of World War II. The post-1991 government goal of having an all-volunteer force failed because it cost more than the government could afford and not enough young Russians were willing to voluntarily serve, even as better paid and treated contract soldiers.
Even though over half of Russian military personnel are now volunteers or career officers, the ability of the military to hold onto those volunteer soldiers was always weakened if there are a lot of casualties or too much chance of being sent to a combat zone. Volunteering to sign a contract to join the army for a number of years used to be considered a smart move because the Russian economy had been increasingly weak over the last decade. After the fighting began in Ukraine, the contract soldiers suffered as much as the conscripts and junior officers did.
The result of this was contract troops refusing to renew contracts. Most of the combat units sent into Ukraine were composed of contract troops who were killed in large numbers. When the survivors got back to Russia, either because of wounds or because many combat battalions returned because of heavy losses, there was a sudden shortage of contract soldiers. That was because most contract troops were near the end of their two-to-three-year contracts and refused to renew. The army had signed up many soldiers for the new, since 2016, short term six to twelve month contracts for former soldiers. Conscripts willing to try it found that there were far fewer veteran soldiers who were willing to sign these short contracts because so few recent short-term contract soldiers had survived service in Ukraine. The government tried to solve this reluctant contract soldier problem by changing the contracts so that contract soldiers had to remain in the army for as long as the fighting continued. Realizing that it was a death sentence if they were sent back to Ukraine, many contract soldiers simply refused to go. There were so many men refusing to go that the government backed off from threats to prosecute.
Soldiers with time left on their contracts were a liability because they told anyone who would listen that the Ukraine Special Operation had been a disaster for Russian troops because they were determined and well-armed, especially with modern anti-tank weapons. The Ukrainians constantly ambushed columns of Russian armored vehicles and soon destroyed most of them. While Russian troops were forbidden to take cell phones with them into Ukraine, the Ukrainians still had them to take photos and videos of the aftermath of these battles, and these were getting back to Russia where Russian veterans of the fighting confirmed they had seen the same grisly evidence of Russian losses or even survived one of these battles.
Russia played down these losses but the Ukrainian military maintained and published daily updates of Russian losses in terms of soldiers killed, wounded or captured as well as equipment losses. After thirty days of fighting the Ukrainians were claiming that over a third of Russian troops sent into Ukraine had been killed, wounded or captured with even larger quantities of vehicles and weapons lost. After six weeks the Russian military admitted that losses were heavier than previously acknowledged but would not give exact figures.
Russia tried to keep Ukrainian reports on the fighting from spreading on the Russian Internet. That was impossible because the Ukrainian after-action reports are all Russians could get as their own government refused to release much data. Moreover, the Ukrainian data appeared accurate because it often includes pictures and identities of the dead Russian troops and details on the losses individual units suffered. The Ukrainians had better access to where these battles took place and proved it with photos and videos showing destroyed vehicles, some of them identifiable as belonging to a particular Russian unit.
Without a lot of volunteer contract soldiers Russia could not replace losses. Replacing lost tanks and other vehicles also proved to be more difficult than expected. On paper Russia had thousands of fully armed and equipped tanks and other armored vehicles in reserve for quickly replacing combat losses. Not surprisingly those reserve vehicles were often in bad shape, having been poorly maintained by conscripts and larcenous civilians who made a lot of money by taking valuable items from these vehicles and selling them. These missing items were usually not reported missing until troops received these vehicles, which were generally mobile enough to be driven onto a railroad flatcar for transportation to units needing them. Once received these reserve vehicles were found missing equipment and in need of extensive repairs to make them combat ready. This was nothing new and has been common since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and the mighty Red Army lost 80 percent of its personnel strength, but few of its ships, aircraft, vehicles and heavy weapons. Most of these ships and vehicles were placed in reserve although many were found abandoned throughout Russia, and new groups of these abandoned vehicles are still being found in forests while known concentrations of these vehicles or aircraft have been picked clean of saleable parts.
As early as 2012 a government investigation found that the army did not have all the troops they were supposed to have. The Russian military, mainly the Army and Interior Ministry paramilitary units, were supposed to have a combined total of million personnel. But officials admitted in 2011, off-the-record, that the real number was closer to 800,000 and slowly but relentlessly declining. A subsequent investigation confirmed this. In 2021 it was still no more than 800,000. Since 2012 the military has come up with a growing list of solutions for the problem but all these efforts do is slow the decline of military manpower numbers, not reverse it. The most recent fix before the 2022 attack on Ukraine involved calling up reservists for a brief period to test the system, but instead of letting the reservists quickly return to civilian life, the military kept many for six months or more. This was one reason for the less than 12 month short-term contract. Doing this too often made reservists refuse to appear when recalled. The economic recession since 2014, because of low oil prices and western sanctions, was supposed to encourage more Russians to volunteer but that did not happen and there was less money for increasing the pay for contract soldiers. Recruiting foreigners had minimal impact and so the Russian military keeps fading away.
The military had 220,000 officers, and many veteran volunteer soldiers who provided technical experts and other senior enlisted personnel. These are higher paid soldiers, some with a decade or more of service, who often became the long-absent Russian NCOs. There are not enough of these NCOs remaining to make a difference. Conscripts still made up nearly half of the military in late 2021 and, after the invasion, it got harder and harder to find enough people to conscript or willing to sign a contract. This means there are two classes of Russian military personnel. Most, about 70 percent, are much less capable, with most of them conscripts in for one year of service or new contract soldiers on two or three-year contracts. These are supervised by inexperienced junior officers, a few surviving career NCOs and a splattering of senior contractors. A third of the military are more enthusiastic volunteers and conscripts. These usually serve in elite special operations, airborne, security and specialist units. In other words, while the government claims to have a million military personnel on duty, the reality is that there are only about 200,000 troops on active duty who are good at what they do and want to be in the military.
By 2012 the military reluctantly accepted the fact that they would not be able to obtain more than 270,000 conscripts a year needed to reach the official strength of a million personnel. In the last six years maintaining anything close to that number meant taking less willing and able men. Senior leaders now accept that they will never command a million-man force.
Lowering their standards in order to make their annual quotas just fills the ranks with more troublesome people, who cause more of the good troops to get out. In the last few years, the military has quietly stopped accepting many volunteers or conscripts from Moslem areas, especially the Caucasus area of Chechnya and Dagestan. The wisdom of this was made clear when Russian intelligence reported that the most effective Russian Moslems who joined and fought for Islamic terrorist groups were military veterans. In contrast, Russian Moslems who had not served in the military were less likely to become Islamic terrorists and if they did, they were used as suicide bombers or support staff, not as long-term fighters. Moreover, commanders continued to report that if more than a few percent of their troops were Moslem there would be morale problems or worse.
With conscripts now in for only a year, rather than two, the military is forced to take a lot of marginal, as in sickly, overweight, bad attitude, and drug user recruits in order to keep the military and Ministry of Interior units up to strength. This worked during the cold war because conscript service was three years for elite units. With one-year conscripts, elite airborne and commando units using some conscripts find that these eager conscripts take a year to master the skills needed to be useful and then they are discharged. Few choose to remain in uniform and become career soldiers. That's primarily because the Russian military is seen as a crippled institution and one not likely to get better any time soon. With so many of the troops now one-year conscripts, an increasing number of the best officers and NCOs get tired of coping with all the alcoholics, drug users, and petty criminals that are taken in just to make quotas. With combat casualties, the exodus of the best leaders and a growing proportion of ill-trained and unreliable conscripts, the Russian military is more of a mirage than an effective combat or even police organization.
The peacetime military was unpopular for conscripts mainly because of the brutal treatment they received. This has not been getting better and hazing incidents are still increasing each year. This is a serious issue. There are a lot of reasons for not wanting to be in the Russian Army but the worst of them is the hazing, which developed after World War II, when Russia deliberately avoided developing professional NCOs. They preferred to have officers take care of nearly all troop supervision. The Soviets failed to note that good NCOs were the key to effective troops. The Soviets felt that officers were more politically reliable, as they were more carefully selected and monitored. The NCOs that did exist were treated as slightly more reliable enlisted men but given little real authority.
Since officers did not live with the men, slack discipline in the barracks gave rise to the vicious hazing and exploitation of junior conscripts by the senior ones. This led to very low morale, and a lot of suicides, theft, sabotage, and desertions. This hazing has been one of the basic causes of crimes in the Russian armed forces, accounting for 20 to 30 percent of all soldier crimes. This caused a military suicide rate that is among the highest in the world. Poor working conditions in general also mean that Russian soldiers are nearly twice as likely to die from accidents, or suicide, then American soldiers. Long recognized as a problem, no solution to the hazing ever worked.
The Russian lack of sergeants has been difficult to fix. Just promoting more troops to that rank, paying them more, and telling them to take charge, has not done the job. So going back to look at how Western armies do it, the Russians noted that those foreign armies provided a lot of professional training for new NCOs and more of it as the NCOs advanced in rank. But this is a long-term process and takes years before benefits will be felt. By 2022 there were more veteran NCOs available and they probably made a difference. But the losses were so heavy in Ukraine that it may never be known how good Russian professional NCOs had become.
All this is in sharp contrast to the old days. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, it had five million troops in its armed forces. By 2022 it was less than 800,000 in Russia, which had about half the population of the Soviet Union but most of the territory. Although the Russian armed forces lost over 80 percent of its strength by the end of the 1990s, a disproportionate number of officers remained. This problem was solved after encountering much resistance from officers in general and, after a series of reforms, the number of officers was reduced by over 50 percent.
The Russian military has an image problem that just won't go away easily. This resulted in the period of service for conscripts being lowered to one year from two in 2008. That was partly to placate the growing number of parents who were encouraging, and assisting, their kids in avoiding military service.
Putin always worked with carefully selected and well trained secret police operatives. He had a hard time appreciating how bad the situation was among army troops. All this came after more than a decade of reforms in the armed forces, particularly the army. Poor discipline, low morale, and incompetent performance are all legacies of the 1921-1991 Soviet-era. Russian commanders, envious of the success of all-volunteer Western forces, have long studied their former foes and decided to adopt a lot of Western military customs. For example, one recent reform ordered that Russian troops would not be confined to their barracks most of the time. In the Soviet era, the conscripted troops were treated like convicts and their barracks were more like a prison than the college dormitory atmosphere found in troop housing for Western military personnel. Russian conscripts are now free to leave the base on weekends and work only a five-day week. Soon nearly all barracks had hot showers and troop accommodations were the best ever. Things like this help a bit but not enough.
Russia tried to change public attitudes towards the armed forces by publicizing all the new changes and programs. But word got around that most of these efforts failed. Blame that on the Internet. Polls consistently show that most military age men do not want to serve in the military and the main reason is the hazing and prison-like conditions in the barracks.
As a result of all these factors, prospects of a revival of the traditional large Russian armed forces continues to fade. The sagging economy as well as casualties and defeats in Ukraine have not helped.