Estimates of the cost to Russia of this adventure include, according to NATO sources, as many as 40,000 killed, captured or wounded Russian troops. Other losses as of March 29th are shown on this chart:
More stunning than numerical losses may be widespread evidence of incompetence and hollowness. Russian vehicles break down due to dry-rotted tires and poor maintenance. Units have abandoned dozens of multimillion-dollar tanks for lack of gas.With all the effort Putin ostensibly put into creating a 21st century military why is there so much dysfunction? Newman continues:
Russia seems to lack modern logistical tools such as cranes, pallets and fork lifts, crucial for moving materiel quickly and safely under stress, including combat. Camouflage efforts are primitive. Russian troops communicate over open radios, susceptible to interception, and loot Ukrainian homes and stores for basics such as food.
One unit of panicked Russian troops appears to have turned on its own leader, running him over with a tank. A top British intelligence official said Russia’s “command and control is in chaos.”
Russia has...become a kleptocracy with endemic graft and plodding state agencies that make America’s federal bureaucracy look like a whiz-bang startup. In Ukraine, those shortcomings may have metastasized into disaster.Newman has more at the link, but there are important lessons we ourselves need to draw from this, and one of them is that morality matters. A nation run by dishonest, avaricious people is like an oak tree diseased and rotted at it's core. It may look impressive, but its looks are no measure of its strength.
“Corruption is part of the political and economic system in Russia, and what we are seeing in Ukraine is part of the explanation,” Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, tells Yahoo Finance.
“The problem is there’s no accountability. We assume this continues to be part of the problem in the Russian military.”
Russia’s annual defense budget is around $62 billion—less than one-tenth what the United States spends. Even then, secret bidding for military contracts and an overcomplicated military bureaucracy leave ample room for graft. In a couple of rare admissions, Russian military leaders have estimated that 20% to 40% of Russia’s military budget is stolen.
Former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, said on Twitter on March 6, “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.”
John Adams famously insisted that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” and his fellow Founding Father James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”
The health of a nation is determined by the health of its moral culture. A culture which tolerates corruption among its elected leaders, their families and friends, will, like the dying oak, not fare well under stress.