Army “increasingly dysfunctional”?
London: Four out of five Russian generals sacked
10/19/2022 9:56 am
The Ukraine war apparently has disastrous consequences for the Russian army and for social cohesion. According to the British Defense Ministry, there is a lack of “capable young Russian officers” and there is anything but continuity among the generals.
After almost eight months of war, the British secret service considers parts of the Russian military leadership to be “increasingly dysfunctional”. As the Ministry of Defense reports in London, there is almost certainly “an increasing lack of capable Russian junior officers who can organize and lead the newly mobilized reservists” at the tactical level.
Poor leadership at the lower levels is also likely to exacerbate low morale and unit cohesion throughout much of the Russian armed forces. Four out of five generals who had direct operational command of the invading forces in February 2022 have now been fired, the report said. “Their successors have done little to improve Russia’s performance on the battlefield.”
The lack of continuity in command is likely to be more disruptive than in Western armed forces, the analysis goes on to say. The reason for this is the Russian military doctrine, according to which the commanders personally draw up the plans and not a broader staff of employees.
Increasing divisions in Russian society
The US think tank Institute for the Study of War However, as a result of the war, she sees an ever-widening gap in the Russian population and increased marginalization of ethnic minorities. The shooting at a military training ground in Belgorod, which is believed to have been carried out by forcibly mobilized Tajiks, is likely a consequence of the Kremlin’s policy of increasing recruitment of minority representatives while protecting ethnic Russians and wealthier Russian citizens, the report said.
According to the think tank, public opinion is now reacting with “virulent xenophobic rhetoric against Central Asian migrants and other social fringe groups”. The institute also leads the leader of the Fair Russia party, Sergei Mironov, who proposed a moratorium on granting Russian citizenship to citizens of Tajikistan. One cannot expect migrants to voluntarily sacrifice themselves for a foreign country, he wrote on Telegram. He also called for “a radical rethink of how the state deals with migration”.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, Mironov’s calls for immigration reform show “the role that partial mobilization has played in accelerating ethnic divisions, racism and xenophobia in Russia’s interior, particularly towards ethnic minorities.”