Eh, it’s going to happen from time to time. I give this about as much currency as Ukraine using Patriot to down that Kinzhal missile that was targeting it. A lot of breathless reporting on both, but neither event is really all that noteworthy.
It’s a lot easier to intercept a ballistic missile headed right at you than it is to defend against them targeting something else. And Patriot uses active radar acquisition. The Russia’s may not be particularly well set-up or trained for SEAD, but that doesn’t mean they have no capability at all. Of course they can detect and geolocate missile batteries (at least the acquisition radar part of it) - they haven’t been very good at zeroing in on mobile batteries in real time, because those shoot and scoot. But they blitzed the hell out of Ukraine’s older fixed batteries in the opening days of the war.
These are normal events in a modern war. Losses are to be expected.
There was damage caused by falling debris, and some or all of that might be connected to that. There was at least one large vehicle fire that was supposedly set by falling debris. Impossible to know the full truth or the details under the circumstances.
Hardly a surprise in my view - the Patriot would definitely be a target as far as Russia is concerned.
Going to the Old Folks Home and hauling away the T-72 designers that created the ‘pop top turret’ flaw will similarly aid in advancing Russia’s war aims.
Well, that’s the problem with most people’s reactions. They don’t expect losses any more. So many of the wars of the last few decades have been against poorly-equipped opponents, we’ve become used to massively disproportionate loss ratios. We’ve forgotten that in a near-peer conflict, we’re going to get bloodied as well.
You’d think a year of this would be enough to remind people, but apparently not.
When you spend twenty years cultivating a culture of corruption, where at every level from the very top to the very bottom it is simply understood that you skim whatever resources are available at your position for your own profit and falsify your reports to your superiors, you don’t get to claim you were misled by your underlings. You know they are lying to you, because you’ve built a system that revolves around lying. Do you honestly think that Putin doesn’t understand how the system works?
Sometimes I have to wonder. I mean, it seems inconceivable that he doesn’t understand that, but then, he went and invaded Ukraine anyways, when any objective assessment of the Russia forces (based on real information about them) should have told him that the invasion was likely doomed from the beginning.
I really have to wonder how deluded Putin really is. And how far down the chain of commend those delusions go. How many people are thinking, “Sure, I’m corrupt, and everything I tell my boss is a lie, but there’s no way my own underlings are pulling that trick on me!”?
And the underlings who are being arrested are saying, ‘I never thought the leopards would eat my face!’
It’s incomprehensible to me how anyone can undertake such a momentous thing as invading another country, without listening to dissenting opinions. But then, history is rife with examples.
First, they all know their underlings are corrupt. They just think that Russia is big and powerful enough that the army is still capable enough to carry out the required tasks even after the inefficiencies resulting from corruption are accounted for.
Second, where they are more delusional is in their assessment of Ukraine. I think, first of all, they do tend to believe their intelligence services’ reports on what’s going on in Ukraine, even though they’re applying political pressure on intelligence to produce reports that say Russian-speaking Ukrainians long to be liberated by Mother Russia etc. And, possibly more importantly, they believe that the Ukrainians are still just as corrupt as Russians are. If both systems are equally corrupt, then Russia’s size will carry it to victory.
Ten years ago, that was largely a correct assessment. But since 2014 Ukraine has worked hard to decrease the amount of corruption throughout civil society, and has simultaneously put a large effort into shifting their military organization from the Soviet model to a western model. Both of those initiatives have a long ways to go, but very significant progress has been made. Ukraine is no longer as corrupt as Russia.
It’s not even clear to me that the Russians appreciate the difference in scale of corruption between them and the west. Obviously we have corruption in the west as well, but the scale is completely different. Russians seem to think that everyone everywhere bullshits on their reports just as much as Russians do. Perhaps the ease with which the Russian oligarchs can by privilege in western society lulls them into this belief.
So I think the issue isn’t that Russians don’t appreciate how corrupt they are. I think the issue is that the Russians fail to appreciate how much less corrupt the west is.
This is an important point that people keep forgetting. Ukraine did quite poorly in 2014. Basically a bunch of paramilitary militias backed by Russian aid and “specialists” (i.e. some troops) pushed Ukraine out of half of the Donbas. Meanwhile the seizure of Crimea was a fait accompli - there was no serious Ukrainian resistance at all.
Ukraine wised up and began aggressively reforming. But the extent to which that was successful was not even widely realized in the west, let alone in Russia. Russia was wildly overconfident, but they had some real reason for their skepticism about Ukrainian capability.
