Article in Foreign Policy: Russia continues to lose its generals in Ukraine.. What are the reasons?

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

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

He said that Russia's military strength - which has the fifth largest regular army in the world with 900,000 soldiers and 2 million reservists, and a defense budget of $65.9 billion - has overshadowed the Eurasia region and NATO in general.

However, the only thing that the Russian army seems to be good at is using heavy artillery fire and committing war crimes, according to the author of the article.

Serious military culture

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

It has been reported that Russia has so far lost 9 of its generals on the battlefield, and a large number of them inside the country as President Vladimir Putin continues his purge of senior officers.

According to the article, increased defense spending and "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 senior military officials and the army's distancing from military oversight have always been among the hallmarks of the Russian state, according to Wright's article.

He gave an example of this with the endeavors of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), whose first step was to abolish parliamentary oversight of the security services and strengthen 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 Social Affairs. Russian interior.

And Yeltsin's desire for personal control at the expense of competence seeped into the rest of the government apparatus, a fact that was 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 in the Soviet Union, after its fall, moved to the management style and leadership style of the new rulers in Russia.

Corruption marred many aspects of the new Russian state.

And when Putin assumed the reins of the presidency for the first time between 2000 and 2008, it was his requirements—not those of the military—that determined the nature of the modernization of Russia's defense services and leadership.

military reforms

According to the Foreign Policy article, the "lackluster" performance of the Russian air force, the inability of the military services to work together, the failure in logistics operations, the failure to promptly share intelligence and reconnaissance data, and the poor organization of the armed forces all showed the extent of the damage it was causing. the military leaders.

Those failures were enough to prompt the reforms that took place in 2008 with the aim of creating a more effective, flexible and scalable army, which were led by Anatoly Serdyukov, who served as Minister of Defense from January 15, 2007 until November 6, 2012.

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

But his distrust of the army and lack of general military knowledge alienated military groups and the military-industrial complex, both of whom are key allies of Putin, fueling fear of those military reforms.

Ultimately, the Military Counterintelligence Department of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) filed a criminal case against Serdyukov, which led to his dismissal in 2012.

Trouble in the leadership of the army

Wright pointed out - in his article - that the current Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, tried to balance nepotism with the need for reforms.

Although he has not yet reversed the structural changes introduced by Serdyukov, he continues to dampen independent criticism and assessment of military operations.

The lack of parliamentary oversight and the politicization of military objectives has 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 group of high-ranking leaders, from the commanders of infantry battalions and tank teams to the heads of electronic warfare units.

The Russian military leadership has shown its unwillingness to delegate powers to junior officers, and this means that not only do generals tend to appear on the battlefield more often, making them vulnerable to attacks, but 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.