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The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine revealed some issues that confirm Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union's Red Army and the Tzarist army. These are long-lasting issues that will most likely persist and not be removed or reduced by much during a couple years of military reform. They are lasting features of the Russian way of war. Some examples:
(1) Some Russian soldiers were completely unaware of where they were and why they were supposed to fight. They believed they were going to participate in exercises. Some soldiers who had fought at a small town were unaware of whether Kyiv had fallen already or not, for they had received no news for weeks. This reminds me of stories about how the Soviet Red Army conscripts sent to Afghanistan often only found out inside Afghanistan where they were, what this war was about and so on.
(2) Many troops particularly of the ill-fated push through the Pripyet marshes NW of Kyiv had lived in horrible conditions in Belarus for weeks (during wintertime!) and were thoroughly demoralised by the time they were sent into Ukraine. Their primary thoughts were about a soft bed in a heated room and some decent hot food, not about military action.
(3) The traffic jam NW of Kyiv and actions elsewhere were reminiscent of a stupid form of 'command push'. It was common during WW2 for Red Army attacks to fail even with surprise, and then the commanders would receive orders to keep press forward. The would order attack wave after attack wave to the same place, from the same direction, without surprise. This was particularly prevalent in 1941/1942. This kind of stubborn top-down commanding was apparently also seen at the cities in the North and around Mykolaiv (though we'll likely have to wait years for confirmation by detailed reports).
(4) Agile and responsive artillery fires aren't a Russian thing. Fire plans developed over days against known positions were the maximum of Red Army artillery competence in 1943-1945, and even the Russian army of today doesn't seem to be capable of much more. They lacked the element of surprise when they started this war and apparently most of their pre-planned fires in the East did hit empty positions. This is the only plausible explanation for their inability to advance significantly in that region afterwards.
By comparison, Ukrainian artillery fires appear to be extremely munitions-austere (likely out of necessity) and thus well-aimed. The biggest I saw on video included about 20 shells.
The Russian military leans heavily on indirect fires. It's a mystery why they wouldn't get more proficient in indirect fires if they're so important to them.
(5) Total disregard for the lives of civilians, including shooting at hospitals (as in Syria already). (I won't pretend that the raping and prisoner abuse/executions are specifically Russian - they're specifically warfare.)
(6) A mix of ancient (1960's technology) equipment with 1990's equipment (and really hardly anything more modern than that!). You can find much 1970's technology in the German army as well (especially armoured vehicles), but the share of ancient equipment in the Russian army appears to be higher, even among these active forces. This is a bit of a mystery, for the production figures of much newer equipment minus their exports and losses at the breakup of the Soviet Union still yields more than enough newer equipment. We saw T-62s in action in 2008 Georgia, and now very early T-72 models that equally belong into museums. This makes simply no sense, even if these were training tanks pressed into combat service as short-term replacement for losses.
(7) Very poorly maintained, outright rusty equipment - even high value equipment such as air defence systems. This is reminiscent of the huge fleet of T-26 and BT-7 tanks in 1941 that was lost with little to show for. Great many T-26 and BT-7 broke down and were easily dismissed instead of offering a good fight.
(8) A tactical air force that is astonishingly ineffective. This is reminiscent of the almost unbelievably marginal impact of the Soviet air power in 1941-1942. Even in 1943 Soviet air power was much claims, little effect. It inflicted serious losses only when the Germans had failed to synchronise anti-air artillery cover with road marches. Then and now the culprit is fairly obvious; too few flying hours for training of the air crews.
(9) They're plain stupid and uneducated. I understand this sounds inappropriate to say, and there are no doubt some smart men in the Russian Army, but they are capable of displays of stupidity and lack of education otherwise not known in Europe. Who else would manage to get radiation sickness at Chernobyl weeks into a war in the area? Stupidity and lack of education are recurring themes in descriptions of the Russian army up to Colonel rank, and they sure provided much evidence to support such claims.
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Several of these points can be traced to a lasting bug in the Russian army and its predecessors: It's lacking good non-commissioned officers. Their NCOs are rather enlisted personnel with some technical expertise. Many task of Western NCOs are left to junior officers in the Russian army. This is a problem because officers are not supposed to live with and close to the enlisted personnel. Officers are a bit detached from the grunts, which helps them make decisions that endanger their lives. Now if you have no NCO class of troops that takes proper care of the enlisted personnel, then you end up with ignorant, demoralised, undisciplined, malnourished, frostbitten enlisted troops. You also end up with the typical Russian and Red Army problem of bullying against new arrival enlisted personnel. To sum it up; much went wrong at the individual to small unit level in the Russian army and its predecessors for well over a hundred years already.
Another issue are reckless orders given by senior officers, especially regarding sustainment and offensive action. There's much pretence of theoretical competence and scientific treatment of military theory, but the practical application ends up being brutish war after war.
The third big theme is corruption, but this cannot really be blamed for this debacle considering how corrupt Ukraine itself is (which likely contributed to the almost no-show of Ukrainian land power in 2014). The logistical problems of the first days were likely magnified by corruption in procurement (including ordinary things like buying poor quality tyres), but also by troops selling off diesel fuel to civilians in anticipation of doing exercises after which the sold fuel would not be missed. To launch an invasion with only partially filled fuel tanks would mess up any logistics plan.
The fourth big theme is the utter failure of the Russian arms industry to provide quality equipment. There has apparently been no progress in tank protection since 1987 despite the rise of diving and overflight top-attack munitions with shaped charges. Air power and air defences are failing against drones that a fighter from 1943 could intercept. The sensors used are quite crappy, too little night vision equipment is in use, the new tactical radio family is either failing technically or not available in sufficient quantity. Artillery fire control tech appears to be largely stuck in the 1980's. China won't be able to solve these issues for Russia, and these issues are very likely a consequence not only of corruption and 1990's brain drain, but also of an economic policy that doubled down on natural resources exploitation by oligarch-controlled megacorporations and provided horrible conditions for high tech or innovative businesses. Russia is largely limited to exports of raw materials and petrochemical products for good reasons.
The Russian army is crap, and it's not even large in comparison to NATO. It's suffering from problems that cannot be solved by a couple years of intense efforts after an embarrassing war. Their economic and fiscal base is collapsing, and they already failed to make significant progress with big budgets in the past decade.
The predecessors of the Russian Army had a long history of poor military performance after the one-off talent of Suvorov, including underperforming even against backward Turks and catastrophically failing in the First World War after starting it with an incredible numerical superiority. The Red Army of 1942-1945 had some of its material quality and quantity issues solved by free imports (Lend-Lease), which enabled it to defeat German forces and their weak allies. The Germans had only about about 60% of German land power and most of the time a minority of German air power on the Eastern Front. Today's PR China could hardly provide assistance equivalent to American Lend-Lease. One reason is that it's not exactly a pool of highest military quality itself and another is the logistical situation; the Trans-Siberian Railway's capacity is still a narrow bottleneck in wartime.
That being said, I should mention that most armies in NATO are outright crap as well.* Some NATO members clearly lack the economic base to do much about that, while some large and wealthy ones mostly have a political and senior officer corps leadership problem. They've wasted too much attention on pointless small wars and other distant missions rather than on the noble task of deterrence & defence. This neglect of conventional warfare capability turned even the rather reputable Western armies into Potemkin' villages with too little technical readiness, too few (artillery) munitions in stock, incomplete equipment with night vision and force structures that make combined arms tactics impossible (such as some brigades without indirect fires capability and without significant battlefield air defence capability).
The difference is that our deficiencies might now be addressed (in a spectacularly inefficient, wasteful way), while there's little reason to believe that the Russians could address their issues effectively. They would need to stop being so Russian to do so.
*: Have a look at the Bulgarian land forces' equipment if you want to see a museum force.
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