Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 26 – The failures of the Russian military in Ukraine have their roots in the failures of the efforts to modernize the Russian army over the last decade, failures that in turn reflect the conviction of its commanders that they will inevitably win such conflicts because they can put more people into the field than their opponents, Vladimir Pastukhov says.
But that assumption, one encouraged by the obsession of the Putin regime with World War II as the measure and touchstone of all things Russian today, the London-based Russian scholar says, is wrong in that quantity alone is now insufficient to defeat qualitatively new military forces (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=623EE3821A7C5).
What we see in Ukraine today is a Russian army that is “big, clumsy, armed in an ineffective way, and mentally out of date, that that still prefers to solve problems with numbers rather than skill,” an army that reflects the same way it did business during World War II, Pastukhov says.
This should not have surprised as many people as it has, he continues. In Putin’s time, two groups have fought the reforms that the Kremlin has sought to carry out, the academics and the military. The latter have been the more successful and in every case their logic has been the same: we won in World War II, and “we can do it again.”
“For this desire to look only backwards, only to the past of Russia, Moscow is now going to have to pay a high price,” Pastukhov says. But such attitudes, in fact encouraged by the Kremlin that claims to be fighting them, are widespread. Indeed, he says, one of his acquaintances in health care shares them.
When anyone proposes reforming healthcare in Russia, his acquaintance always says: “Don’t touch our medicine. It survived the Great Fatherland War.” That may be true of Russian medicine and the Russian military, but it doesn’t guarantee either of them any success in confronting new challenges.
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