Adding Up Russia’s Industrial-Scale War Crimes
In the early days of the conflict, when it became obvious how bad the Russian military was at warfighting, it was a favorite pastime of military analysts (myself included) to dissect the Russian military’s tactics and lampoon their inability to perform basic battlefield tasks.
Putin fell victim to the information paradox that befalls all authoritarians eventually — nobody wants to give the boss bad news.
He was led to believe his military was on par with western counterparts; instead, his special military operation highlighted his soldiers’ incompetence.
Andrey Kozyrev, Russian foreign minister from 1990–1996, tweeted about the corruption that has hobbled the Russian military:
“The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So, they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military.”
But there’s a dark side to an incompetent military.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives have been destroyed or uprooted — families have been separated, there has been sexual violence on a still yet undetermined scale, and the intentional murder of civilians, among many other atrocities that I’ll…
