Russia's army is corrupt, incompetent, poorly led, and very very deadly

This is a good, up to date map of the war.

Do you want to know why the current map of the war in Ukraine looks the way it does?  Why the Russian army hasn’t moved out of the lands it already occupied in Donetsk and Luhansk in the east?  Why the map shows they still haven’t taken Kyiv or Kharkiv, despite having forces arrayed around both cities?  Why in the south, they have taken the port cities of Kherson and Mariupol, but they haven’t even gotten within shelling distance of Odessa to the West?

The Russian army can’t move its troops in helicopters because they are getting shot down by Ukrainian forces armed with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.  Russian convoys, especially to the north of Kyiv, are getting shot up, stalled, and are running out of gas.  Their convoys can’t be protected by Russian fighters because they are in too much danger of being shot down.  The Russians are having difficulty resupplying their convoys because they have committed nearly all the trucks they had assembled in Russia and Belarus before they first attacked.  They are exhausting their ability to back up their own forces.  Some Russian units are reported to be short on food and water, and at least some of them must be running low on ammunition by now.

What the Russians do have is more soldiers, and CNN reported yesterday that Russia was “poised” to deploy as many as 1,000 so-called “mercenaries” to Ukraine: “The mercenary forces would fortify the flagging units, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine [is in] its second weekend.”  So-called “mercenaries” are the way military experts are referring to Russian volunteer soldiers, those who have not been conscripted and are thought to be better trained and equipped than the conscripts.  CNN also reported that “Russian forces have struggled with morale issues and setbacks on the battlefield, including a massive convoy north of Kyiv that has remained largely stalled for the past several days.”  Many of the troops in the convoy are drivers and what the military calls quartermaster supply troops, and I can guarantee you that the soldiers doing those jobs are conscripts.

Retired general and former Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster was on CNN this morning talking about the Russian strategy for the war.  He said because Russian forces have been stymied by the Ukrainian military and their inability to use the skies, they have settled on a strategy of getting their forces to within range of their artillery and missile batteries, establish fire bases, and shell the civilian areas of the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv mercilessly.  “They are committing mass murder of the Ukrainian people,” McMaster said with a mix of amazement and anger.

It’s all the Russian army can do at this point, but it’s a lot, and it is very, very deadly.  The Washington Post reported today that civilians are streaming out of Irpin, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, because it has come under heavy Russian bombardment.  The place the Russian convoy stopped in Zdvyzhivka that I described as a possible fire base for Russian artillery could hit Irpin but is too far from downtown Kyiv to hit without moving closer to the center of the city.  Kyiv is suffering damage from Russian rocket attacks, however, which can fire from further away.

Damage to Kharkiv is worse because it is closer to the Russian border and Russian forces have been within artillery and rocket range for days. 

Russian president Putin announced yesterday that he was ready to establish evacuation corridors for Ukrainian refugees but only leading into Russia or Belarus.  His proposal was swiftly rejected by Ukraine’s President Zelensky as “unacceptable,” not only because Ukrainian citizens don’t want to be evacuated to the two hostile nations that are attacking their country, but because I think Zelensky is afraid Russian forces would target the refugee corridors with their artillery and then claim Ukrainians were shooting at their own citizens.  It’s exactly the kind of thing Putin specializes in:  perpetrating a horror and then blaming it on the victim.  It the Russians are killing civilians in the cities, why wouldn’t they kill them when they were evacuating as refugees?  It’s cold-blooded murder either way.

The Russian army, which looked heavily armed and fearsome when satellite images showed it assembling across the Ukrainian border before the war, has proved to be not as powerful as it looked.  Cracks are showing in its invasion strategy and the tactics Russian military leaders have employed.  Their plan was clearly to overwhelm Ukrainian forces and achieve a quick surrender of the major cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv and the Ukrainian government.  That strategy has failed.  Now they are reduced to a tactical fallback position of shelling Ukraine’s people into submission, and those tactics appear to be failing, too.

It’s as if when the Vietnam war was going badly for the U.S. in the late 60’s, we had employed the My Lai massacre as our strategy for the entire war, that military commanders had ordered the wholesale murder of Vietnamese civilians until the country submitted to American rule.  That didn’t happen, of course.  My Lai was treated as the war crime that it was, but as our military continued to flail around, looking for a way to “win” against a country that would not submit, the misbegotten nature of the whole enterprise began to dawn on the soldiers sent over there to fight a war that seemed to have no discernible purpose.  U.S. army soldiers began to conclude it was all for nothing, morale collapsed, and what in the military they call the fighting effectiveness of the army diminished and finally just went away.

Putin is right now in the same situation with his army.  They are the ones who are aiming and firing the cannons and missiles that are flying into civilian areas and killing women and children.  If they don’t know already, they will soon see the results of following the orders of their corrupt commanders who know exactly what they are doing and to whom.  This is going to lead to the same sort of collapse of morale and effectiveness in the Russian army, if it hasn’t already.  There have been reports of Russian units throwing down their arms and surrendering to Ukrainian soldiers and using cell phones loaned by Ukrainians to call their families back in Russia.  You’ve probably read that at least some Russian conscripts claim they didn’t know they were in Ukraine and thought they were on a training exercise of some kind until the bullets started coming at them.

It took more than a decade for the American military to recover from its hollowed-out state after the end of the Vietnam war.  Congress had to end the draft and institute the so-called “all-volunteer” military and raise pay and service conditions in order to improve morale among the troops and get the military back on its feet.

Russia is going to find itself with the same demoralized army even before this war is over, no matter how it ends.  A “win” by Russia will not be perceived as a win at all when the Russian military comes to realize what the entire world already knows, that they have destroyed the country that was their neighbor and not their enemy only two weeks ago.  I think a “loss” will end up being a stalemate followed by a ceasefire and negotiations over the same issues that were on the table before Russia invaded and shot the hell out of everything.  An agreement of some kind will be reached over the Donbas and Crimea and the whole thing will grind to a bloody, tragic halt.

Either way, Putin has shown Russia to be a hollow shell when it comes to its conventional military, and a force to be reckoned with only because it has nuclear weapons.  In other words, Russia will continue on its course of being an outlaw state bent on blackmailing everyone to get its way. 

The Russian people are going to discover what it’s like to live within the walls of the prison Putin has built with his iniquity.  Putin is going to learn what it’s like to try to wield power after the whole world sees that you are a pitiful, helpless giant rattling a nuclear saber alone in the dark.