The news coming out of Ukraine aren't good for Russia. 10,741 visually confirmed losses
of pieces of heavy equipment, 2054 of which are tanks either destroyed, abandoned, or captured.
Estimates without visual confirmation place this at around 3,000. Over half of its Ka-52 attack
helicopter fleet destroyed, with five in one week during the June Ukrainian counteroffensive alone.
Documents revealed by the infamous Discord leak show that the Department of Defense
estimates Russia has suffered between 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, with between 35,500 to
43,000 KIA. And that was before the Ukrainian counteroffensive began,
with fierce fighting across the northern front. Alleged HIMARS strikes were especially
devastating, with one strike in mid-June that allegedly killed dozens of Russian soldiers
waiting to hear their commander speak- that information has yet to be verified however.
As its offensive began, Ukraine enacted a media blackout across
its front- ceding the propaganda war to Russia for several weeks. However,
when the lights came back on the world saw a steady stream of Russian POWs being marched
away from the front. The Russian lines aren't crumbling, but they are breaking- and Ukraine
is yet to put the full might of its reserve, western-trained firepower into the fight.
So why can't Russia field better troops and equipment?
'Better' is a relative term when Russia is concerned, especially when talking about its
troops. Historically, Russian troops have severely underperformed against any international grading
system. While in exercises like its famous ZAPAD combined arms exercise, Russia got to LARP as
a professional, western military- the truth is that when put to the test, Russian soldiers fail.
In the first Chechen war, the massive Russian army was roundly defeated by Chechen rebels.
Russia's initial force of 23,800 faced off against an estimated 1,000 strong rebel army,
increasing to 6,000 after a year of fighting. Despite this, Russia suffered a whopping
14,000 killed or missing, and 52,000 wounded. Estimates on the Chechen side place military
losses at 3,000 dead. Even Russia's elite paratroopers, worshiped as demigods in
Russian society, thoroughly embarrased themselves such as in the infamous case
where a 50 strong assault force landed behind enemy lines and was promptly taken captive,
forcing the Russian military to fly helicopters overhead blasting out a warning that if they
weren't released, the Russian air force would destroy several villages nearby.
The second Chechen war wouldn't go much better, though Russia managed to subdue the region by
backing pro-Russian Chechen warlords. In both cases however, Russian military failures were
so significant that they were forced to rely on brute force alone to subdue the region. In the
now infamous bombings of Grozny and other Chechen cities, the Russian military leveraged the only
real advantage it had: superior firepower. Through an extensive bombing and artillery campaign,
Chechnya was reduced to rubble, with civilian casualties estimated to be as high as 100,000.
When your troops are hot garbage, it helps if you have the world's largest artillery corps.
The real question is, why are Russian troops so bad, and can they get any better?
Russia's woes, as always, go back to its extreme corruption. Since the fall of the Soviet Union,
Russia has struggled to field a western-style professional military, and has relied
overwhelmingly on conscription. Before the Ukraine conflict, it had made significant strides towards
that goal, with an estimated three quarters of its armed forces being professional volunteer
soldiers. The service length for conscripts was also dropped from 24 months to 12 months,
which after training and orientation only gave Russia about 5 months of use from each batch
of conscripts. However, tellingly, conscripts still made up to a third of Russia's combat arms
forces- including even its elite Spetsnatz units, something which is unthinkable in the US military.
The difference between conscripts and volunteers is significant, with volunteer soldiers having
greater morale and proficiency than conscripts. Typically a volunteer soldier chooses to serve,
and is more motivated to do so than a conscript forced to serve. However,
volunteer soldiers also serve for longer terms, allowing their military to get more combat-ready
time out of them in relation to the length of their training, and to build a greater degree
of proficiency and thus lethality over time. Professional volunteers also form the backbone
of the military itself, moving up the ranks and increasing in knowledge and expertise,
making them and their organization more efficient. Once a conscript's term is up,
they are offered service contracts- but the vast majority choose to immediately leave,
taking their talent, millions of rubles in training costs, and expertise with them.
And speaking of backbones, Russia's military has none- not just in that it's a cowardly army
incapable of standing up to a peer adversary and forced to try to bomb civilians instead,
but as in it lacks the basic building block of a professional,
western style military. Volunteers who reenlist advance in rank, making up the Non-comissioned
officer corps that is so integral to the success of a modern military. These are
the senior enlisted men who's job it is to oversee the day-to-day operation of the
military- everything from enforcing training standards to direct battlefield leadership.
Instead of an NCO corps, Russia makes junior and warrant officers take up these roles- much to its
detriment. These are typically men and women who have had higher academic training and are thus
more valuable and more rare, and better suited for the challenges of higher leadership positions
than watching over a squad of conscripts. This forces Russia to overwork its officers,
placing significant stresses on them and inevitably leading to the deferment of authority
and leadership to senior conscripts or low-ranking recruits. And this is not a modern problem either,
as noted during the Cold War, Soviet units were typically run by second-year conscripts,
with even what few NCOs the Soviet Union did have deferring to them in most matters.
For any of our viewers who have ever served in the military,
you can well imagine what a nightmare scenario it would be to have E-2s and E-3s in charge of
running day-to-day operations. You can probably also imagine just how
well those operations were managed, let alone actual battlefield actions.
NCOs are responsible for making sure that orders from on top are followed through,
and we have plenty of evidence from the Ukrainian conflict that this is
not always being followed through, or done so poorly thanks to the lack of a
solid leadership structure amongst Russian units. However Russia's lack of NCOs also
directly contributes to its biggest problem in attracting and keeping talented recruits: hazing.
It's called 'the rule of the grandfathers', and it's a nightmare of hazing that would
make any college frat initiation ritual look like a pleasant walk in the park. The secret
to Russian military hazing is that it never stops, it just perpetually flows downhill,
even from the highest echelons of military power. Older conscripts brutalize those
younger than them, with what few NCOs exist brutalizing the senior conscripts,
while officers do the same to their NCOs. Beatings, humiliations, torture,
even forced labor and sexual assault. There are a wide range of reports of Russian leaders simply
renting their troops to local villages to use for hard labor. Meanwhile, older recruits and
conscripts commit outright sexual assault on younger conscripts and force them to beg
their families for money so they can steal it. Officers meanwhile look the other way, mostly
because they're engaged in different forms of hazing themselves- albeit at a more subtle level.
Hazing is nothing new in the Russian armed forces, it's a pass-me-down from the Soviet time. Hazing
however is pure poison to a military, as it destroys unit cohesiveness and retention. In
his memoir, Kyril Podrabinek wrote in 1970 that if his unit was thrust into combat,
half of the unit might shoot the other half. There have been no documented cases of this happening,
but there are plenty of cases of murder spurred on by hazing in the Russian armed forces. But where
it really hurts a military is in its ability to retain talent- even with significant incentives,
only 1 percent of Soviet conscripts reenlisted with the army, that figure has not improved much.
Especially because after the fall of the Soviet Union, the situation got
even worse. Political officers were removed from military units, taking away one major source of
discipline in the Red Army. The entire military received a significant reduction in pay, prompting
junior officers to steal equipment or from their own troops, or be too preoccupied with a second
job to pay much attention to the discipline of their unit. In 2002, the BBC published a report
where senior Russian soldiers were selling those junior to them into prostitution rings.
As the Russian economy recovered, hazing seems to have improved somewhat- but it's impossible
to know given how tight-lipped Russia is. A law passed by Vladimir Putin in 2015 made
military fatalities suffered in peace time a state secret, in effect making it impossible
to calculate how many conscripts or recruits were being killed or committed suicide due to hazing.
A key aspect of a modern military are ready reserves. The US military fields reserves for
all of its branches except for the Space Force, and these reserves were of critical importance
during the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Good reserve systems allow a military to retain a large
pool of proficient soldiers it can call upon in case of war, long after they've been separated
from the military. With monthly training capped by a larger evolution once a year, reservists
maintain proficiency in their respective career fields while living a civilian life. This
allows a nation to double or more its standing forces with proficient soldiers in case of war,
rather than bloat it with freshly conscripted soldiers with no training or expertise.
Russia however lacks a modern reserve system. In 2008 the nation launched a massive reform
aimed at creating a professional NCO corps and a reserve system. Both goals have failed. Instead,
Russia has focused on improving its air and rocket forces- though you really wouldn't
know it by looking at the performance of the Russian aerospace forces in Ukraine,
which has been abysmal. Despite having nearly one million people with previous
serivce time to call upon, this pool of Russian personnel only
served their single one year term and have limited military proficiency. Meanwhile,
less than ten percent of this potential reserve force receives any kind of refresher training.
And training may be Russia's biggest problem- because it simply doesn't do much of it. Russian
military culture has a tradition of what are known as 'picture reports'. Where as a western military
would file a report on the results of training, with updated goals and frequent inspections,
the Russian military simply marches its troops to a firing range, has them fire
off one or two shots, takes a picture, and calls it a day. The photo report serves its purpose:
it establishes that on the required day, said unit was in fact at the range shooting their
allotment of ammunition to maintain proficiency. In reality, the officers
simply take the budget given to them for training and split it amongst themselves.
The same goes for soldiers' actual pay. A Russian unit commander is responsible for
receiving and disseminating his soldiers' pay- naturally, said commander skims a percentage
off the top for himself first. This system also incentivizes commanders to overstate
their unit numbers- despite not being at full strength, a commander will report all billets
filled so that he can receive pay allotted to soldiers who don't exist. Meanwhile, when
senior Russian officers make battlefield decisions on what units to deploy where,
they do so not realizing that those units may be significantly under-strength.
This culture is not an accident however. Rather, it's part of the social contract that Russia's
culture of corruption has established with all branches of its government and military. You're
free to be corrupt as long as you (largely) do as you're told and help push the messages
Putin’s propaganda is disseminating. The only time Russia cares about corruption is when it
gets in the way of state goals- even now with the Russian military in a catastrophic state,
Vladimir Putin is helpless to enact the anti-corruption measures drastically
needed to turn things around, because if he were to do so he would face mass
revolt from the higher echelons of the military and government.
But Russia's training problems have become acute,
and now the nation faces a true crisis just when it needs well trained troops the most.
As the war in Ukraine entered its six month mark, Russian losses were so severe that it was being
forced to reach deep for additional personnel. This is when Russia made a move that baffled
western observers: it began to pull instructors away from its training bases and put them on
the front lines. These senior soldiers may have been better trained and more proficient than the
losses they were replacing, but by removing this experienced training staff, Russia was ensuring
that follow-on reinforcements would not receive the benefit of their lessons and experience.
Instead, Russia was forced to install junior training staff, with predictably poor results.
Russia has officially entered what is known in the west as a military death
spiral. This is when a military's best and most proficient soldiers- a term we use very loosely
when talking Russia- are killed or wounded, and then replaced with reinforcements that are less
trained and proficient, and are subsequently decimated. Their replacements now are even
worse prepared for combat, and on and on in a death spiral that eats militaries alive.
This death spiral is evident across the Ukrainian front, with Russia suffering
significant casualties even in what is essentially an offensive that is currently made up of light,
reconnaissance-in-force attacks. Ukraine has yet to commit significant combat power to the
offensive in a breakthrough operation, and across the entire front Russian troops are
losing ground. The losses may only be measured in hundreds of meters, but the fact that they
are being pushed back nearly everywhere is a sign of how poorly the Russians are performing.
This death spiral is most evident in Russia's aerospace forces
though. Russian pilots are already poorly trained by western standards,
with their American counterparts having four times or more the flight hours by the time
they graduate to their assigned air frame. When it comes to providing close air support,
an element of battle badly needed by Russian troops on the front, Russia's disadvantages
are even more significant, with only a fraction of its pilots trained in this role. Famously,
during one of the recent incursions into the Belgorod region by Russian partisans, a Russian
fighter pilot attempted to bomb partisan forces and missed by an embarrassingly wide margin. The
event inspired many around the world to refer to the two pilots involved as “Putins Flop Guns.”
Russia has lost 425 aircraft so far in the war in Ukraine,
and its Ka-52 attack helicopter fleet has been decimated with over half of it being destroyed.
These losses mean not just the loss of air frames costing tens of millions of rubles,
but often of their pilots as well- and they are just as hard to replace for a beleagured
Russia. The nation has now been forced to move senior flight instructors to frontline duty,
and thanks to a specific Russian doctrine of assigning the most dangerous operations to the
most senior pilots, this has resulted in many of them getting killed as well. Now, Russian
aerospace forces are in significant danger of having a severe training deficit- while this won't
mean an end to the war today, as the war evolves Russia's airborne advantage is certain to break.
A sign of desperation can be seen in the way that Russia has sent its remaining Ka-52s into
frontline fighting in recent weeks. Despite staggering casualties in the first year of
the war, Russia has sent its attack helicopters to stop Ukrainian thrusts in sheer desperation,
resulting in 5 Ka-52s confirmed destroyed in less than a week of fighting. These are completely
unsustainable losses, and Russia's aviation is rapidly approaching a point of critical failure.
And that brings us to Russia's other biggest
problem- why can't it replace its combat losses with better equipment?
For at least a year the world has joked about Russia sending in its
ancient T-54s and T-55s after stripping them out of museums- yet as summer began,
that's exactly what happened with visual confirmation of these ancient early Cold
War tanks being shipped into Ukraine. As it claimed about its old T-62s,
Russia said that these vehicles would serve as static fortresses and provide long-range fire
support. Naturally, this was a lie, and T-55s were confirmed destroyed in combat by Ukraine.
Estimates vary, but Russia is believed to be able to produce about 60 tanks a month-
but these estimates are muddied by a lack of independent data and the fact that Russia's
tank plants both build new tanks and refurbish old ones, without specifically stating the difference.
Thus it's impossible to know if these sixty or so tanks a month are brand new
or mostly refurbished Cold War relics. What is known is that Russia loses on average 150
tanks a month, meaning it's not even replacing half of its combat losses.
And what it is replacing, it's not doing with very good equipment. At the end of the day,
a tank is still a significant threat if you don't have something to deal with it. A T-55
may be a joke, but it's significantly less funny if you're an infantryman without tank support of
your own or an anti-tank guided missile. Luckily, with western donations of both tanks and ATGMS,
Ukraine has both- not in numbers to match Russia, but enough to achieve a level of
battlefield parity due to one big difference between Ukraine and Russia's tanks: technology.
Russia's biggest problem in replacing any hardware is the extreme sanctions levied against it by the
world. Russia is now the most sanctioned state in history, and these sanctions have effectively
eviscerated the Russian defense industry. While the nation builds its own tanks, armored vehicles,
aircraft, and missiles- all of these rely on electronics and components made in the west
or abroad. Before the war, nearly all optics going into Russian tanks came from the west,
and over half of the microchips needed in its weapons as well. Ball bearings,
which are of critical importance to modern equipment, are difficult to manufacture
with a high degree of proficiency, and Russia imported most of those
form the west. Now it's forced to turn to alternatives that are of lower quality.
But alternatives for other tech simply aren't widely available. Microchips for example are
of critical importance, and Russia has been forced to rely on lower-quality Chinese chips
as well as those it can smuggle in via alternative means. Russia is quite adept at sanctions busting,
but while it's impossible to completely stop Russia from getting western technology,
shutting off the tap means that what tech it does get is limited in quantity and much more
expensive than it would be on the global market. This limits Russia physically and financially,
and leads to things such as Russia's new T-80s and T-92s rolling off production
lines having gunner's sights rather than sophisticated optics and fire computers.
With Ukraine getting access to more and more modern western armored vehicles,
what vehicles Russia can replace on the front are simply no match. This leaves Russia to rely
on its artillery advantage, but even that has been significantly lessened due to a shortage
of ammunition. While Russia initially enjoyed a 20 to 1 advantage in artillery,
combat losses to precision western systems and a global shortage of ammo
has led to that advantage dropping to as little as 6 to 1. To make matters worse,
domestically produced ammunition has been found to be of low quality, with thousands
of artillery rounds in one shipment declared unfit for use after a series of accidents.
Russia's ability to resupply itself is dwindling with every passing month,
and thanks to targeted sanctions, the prognosis is not good. The final hope that Russia has is
for China to finally agree to providing lethal military aid, a move that will draw international
condemnation against the Chinese and possibly even its own sanctions. Chinese President Xi
Jinping has proven hesitant to cross this red line drawn by the United States, but he also
has little interest in seeing Russia fail and be left a weakened, broken husk that could collapse
into civil war at any time. In order to keep the US on its toes and with its attention split
between Asia and Europe, China needs Russia to remain a credible threat to Europe- in time,
Xi may have no choice but to let the tanks roll for Russia, expanding this conflict.
But until such a time, Russia's only real advantage over Ukraine is the sheer size
of its army and Russians' own incredible appetite for casualties. Having suffered
horrifically one-sided losses that would have resulted in mass protests in western nations,
Russia appears to remain politically stable,
with little sign of the general Russian populace getting ready to rise up and depose Putin.
Now for a laugh check out Everything Going Wrong For Russia In War Against Ukraine,
or click this other video instead!