Ukraine ping
On the 3rd day of the Ukraine campaign, February 27, 2022, Kamil Galeev, a young Tatar scholar in exile from Russia, made a bold claim - that Russia would lose this war. While the war’s resolution remains unclear, this proposition was diametrically opposed to what the solons and the chatterati, the great and the good, were telling us - viz that Russia was bound to win it all in a matter of days. Just over 7 months later, it appears Galeev was closer to the truth than many of the experts whose job was to have a good grasp of such contingencies. This essay goes into a number of topics:
- The problem of limited resources, once the Russian state decided to downsize military spending drastically from perhaps 1/3 of the economy during the Soviet era to around 4%
- The failure of military reform, due to entrenched interests each looking to preserve its piece of a much smaller pie
- The difficulty reconciling Putin’s desire for a big army *and* a powerful navy with Russia’s much smaller military budget
- The evolution of the Ukrainian military from a non-functional organization into a real army, starting with the Russian invasion in 2014
- The reappearance of the kind of nationalism in Ukraine, after its 2014 military defeat in Crimea and a part of the Donbass, that is willing to bleed, and die, to defend the nation’s continued existence.
Let’s not forget the corruption, the concrete reactive armor is significant. Maybe the Western Anti-Tank Weapons are working far better than they should.
Thanks. Kamil Galeev is writing very interesting threads https://threadreaderapp.com/user/kamilkazani
Comment at UK Mail
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BobbyC2022, Salford, United Kingdom, 2 hours ago
The main effect of Putin’s war has been to demonstrate how superior Western liberal democracy is to dictatorship. In the West generals are chosen for military competence. In Russia for loyalty to Putin. Putin’s attack on Ukraine is like Stalin’s attack on Finland in 1939. One million dead Russians and 25,000 dead Finns according to Khrushchev. And for similar reasons. Incompetent leaders. Stalin liquidated the entire professional and competent top military commanders and replaced them with incompetent loyalists. It’s a common problem of p a r a n o i d dictators like Putin and Stalin. Its even worse in the Putin era since Russia is riddled with c o r r u p t i o n from top to bottom. Everyone is on the take. Most of the money that should have gone on military spares has gone into the pockets of the mid-level Russian leaders and officers.
Thanks for the ping!