Article in Foreign Policy: Russia's loss of its generals in Ukraine continues... What are the reasons?

The American magazine "Foreign Policy" published an article on the many failures of the Russian army, whether in the battlefields in Ukraine, or in its attempts to fix weaknesses in its devices and methods of work.

The article's author, Austin Wright, an expert on arms control and strategic trade, stated that before last February, Russia was seen as one of the world's major military powers.

He said that Russia's military power - which has the fifth largest regular army in the world of 900,000 soldiers, 2 million reserves, and a defense budget of $65.9 billion - overshadowed the Eurasia region and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in general.

However, the only thing the Russian military seems to be good at is the heavy use of artillery fire and the commission of war crimes, as described by the author of the article.

Dangerous military culture

While what is particularly embarrassing - in the opinion of Austin Wright - is Russia's ability to kill or remove its top military leaders.

Russia has so far been reported to have lost 9 of its generals on the battlefield, and many more inside the country as President Vladimir Putin continues his purge of senior officers.

According to the article, increased defense spending and an "hostile" foreign policy have failed to address the "serious" issues that have plagued Russia's military culture since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The consolidation of power in the hands of a few high-ranking military officials and the disassociation of the military from military oversight have long been hallmarks of the Russian state, according to Wright's article.

He gave an example of this with the efforts of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), whose first step was to abolish parliamentary oversight over the security services and consolidate his control over the Ministries of Defense and Interior, as well as the KGB intelligence service through the establishment of the Ministry of Security and Affairs Russian interior.

Yeltsin's desire for personal control at the expense of competence seeped into the rest of the government, a fact evident in his defense minister, Pavel Grachev, who was considered incompetent by many.

Wright went on to say that the shortcomings that were a prominent feature of the Soviet Union were transferred after its fall to the management style and leadership style of the new rulers in Russia.

It was that corruption marred many aspects of the new Russian state.

When Putin first assumed the presidency between 2000 and 2008, it was his requirements - not those of the military - that determined the nature of modernizing Russia's defense services and command.

Military reforms

According to the Foreign Policy article, the Russian Air Force's "flawless" performance, the military's inability to cooperate, logistics failures, the failure to promptly share intelligence and reconnaissance data, and the poor organization of the armed forces showed the extent of the damage being caused. Where the military leaders.

Those failures were enough to spur the reforms of 2008 aimed at creating a more effective, resilient, and scalable army that were spearheaded by Anatoly Serdyukov, who served as defense minister from January 15, 2007, to November 6, 2012.

Through these reforms, Serdyukov tried to significantly reduce the number of officers by 2013, reorganize the military units, and create a financial control department within the Ministry of Defense to control the flow of funds to the General Staff.

But his distrust of the military and a lack of general military knowledge alienated the military groups and the military-industrial complex, both of which are Putin's main allies, fueling fear of those military reforms.

Eventually, the Russian Federal Security Service's Military Counterintelligence Department filed a criminal case against Serdyukov that led to his dismissal in 2012.

A defect in the leadership of the army

In his article, Wright noted that the current Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, tried to balance nepotism with the need for reforms.

Although he has not yet reversed the structural changes Serdyukov introduced, he continues to quell independent criticism and evaluate military operations.

The lack of parliamentary oversight and the politicization of military objectives created an environment in which Putin operates “with distorted information that generally overestimates the standing of the armed forces, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Russia's experience in Ukraine is a good example of this, according to Wright, who explained that the Russian leadership has lost a whole range of high-ranking commanders, from commanders of infantry battalions and tank divisions to heads of electronic warfare units.

The Russian military leadership has shown an unwillingness to delegate powers to junior officers, which means not only that generals tend to be more visible on the battlefield and vulnerable to attack, but that junior officers also lack the experience to lead operations on the battlefield when called upon.

The writer concludes - at the end of his article - that the losses of the Russian army were exacerbated by the shortage of officers to replace those lost in the war.