September 27, 2024: President Vladimir Putin ended 2021 by threatening war with NATO to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union. Putin believes Ukraine is part of Russia and the Ukrainians disagree. Since 2014 Russia has been making a lot of headlines but not much sense. The economy is a mess, as in stagnant and shrinking. Russia has fewer friends or allies and the future looks dim. Sending troops into Ukraine (2014 and 2022), Syria (2015) and Libya (2016) has not helped solve any of the fundamental problems there but made for great propaganda. The latest military invasion in Ukraine backfired badly and in less than a year had destroyed most of the Russian army, wrecked the Russian economy and keeps getting worse with Ukrainian forces, backed by weapons and economic aid from NATO nations, pushing Russian troops out of Ukraine.

Many Russians are asking themselves; what went wrong? Russia entered the 21st century with a new elected government dominated by former secret police (KGB) officers who promised to restore economic and civil order. They did so but in the process turned Russia into a police state with less political and economic freedom. Many Russians opposed this and the government responded by appealing to nationalism. Russia has turned into what Germany had become in the 1930s. This included police state ways and the traditional threatening attitude towards neighbors. Rather than being run by corrupt communist bureaucrats, the country is now dominated by a collection of corrupt businessmen, gangsters and self-serving government officials that characterized the last czarist government of a century ago. The semi-free economy is more productive than the centrally controlled communist one but that just provides more money to steal. A rebellion against the new dictatorship has been derailed by astute propaganda depicting Russia as under siege by the West and NATO. Opinion polls show wide popular support for this paranoid fantasy but some Russians continue to struggle for better government and beneficial reforms. For now, most Russians want economic and personal security and are willing to tolerate a police state to get it. But the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions did more damage than the ruling politicians expected. That atmosphere, plus the anxiety generated by having troops fighting in Syria, Ukraine and Libya has scared away a lot of foreign investors and many Russian ones as well. Russia can downplay this in the state-controlled media but without all that foreign and Russian capital the economy cannot grow. Since 2014 most Russians can see daily that they are worse off than before.

There is another serious problem that few want to discuss, corruption. Even in wartime, and especially during the Ukraine war, corruption is a staggering problem. Officers and other government officials put their own financial gain above the need to equip the troops with what they needed to survive and win. The difficulty here is that the military’s corruption is rooted in political corruption at the highest levels with Putin and his cronies grabbing whatever they could for almost 20 years. This inevitably drifted downward until even supply sergeants routinely stole back and sold gear issued to new troops when they were outside their barracks just before leaving for the front. Russia is descending into a Third World state known as a resource kleptocracy but run by a for-real gangster confederacy. Only with nuclear and biological weapons from before it fell apart. All this enthusiasm for military reform was thought to have been taken care of in 2022, on the eve to the invasion of Ukraine. As before, it was discovered that previous reforms had not worked, generally from not being implemented at all.

Those who had followed the history of failed efforts to reform the Russian army since the 1990s were not surprised at what happened to Russian troops when they encountered their Ukrainian counterparts. Before the invasion, most Russians believed that the Ukrainian troops were no match for Russian soldiers. Russians also found it hard to believe that the Ukrainians, who were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, had managed in less than a decade after Russia’s first invasion in 2014 to implement many fundamental reforms. Some of these reforms were far more ambitious than any Russia ever attempted. After a few months of fighting in Ukraine it was painfully obvious that Russian troops were no match for their Ukrainian adversaries. Before that, Russians believed that their dismal reform efforts had magically worked as nearly half their combat units assembled on the Ukrainian border.

Reports from the Russian capital, which Ukrainian military leaders believed, indicated the decision had been made to invade despite obvious defects in the training, morale and equipment of Russian units. The reality of the differences between Russian and Ukrainian forces was soon made clear as the advance was stopped short of its goals and suffered heavy casualties in the process. Copies of the attack plan, which were only distributed to a few senior commanders leading the attack, showed that the Russians believed they could quickly reach and take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and replace the government with a pro-Russian one and declare the war over. At that point the rest of Ukraine was supposed to surrender and get used to being Russian once more.

Meanwhile China, the only real threat to Russia, quietly makes progress in the east. There China has claims on much of the Russian Far East and is openly replacing Russia as the primary economic, military and political force in Central Asia.