21.04.2023.

Corruption in the Russian military system: Money before strategy

The corruption index is high in all key segments - political, financial, as well as the personal integrity of the people who manage the military industry, according to analysts.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the beginning of the invasion of neighboring Ukraine that "it is only a matter of weeks when Russian troops will enter Kiev", that "prophecy" already turned into "several months, up to half a year" in March of last year. .

They were probably also surprised in Kiev by the unorganized attacks of Russian units in the first months of the aggression. Although by that time a huge number of civilian buildings, schools, hospitals and public infrastructure had been destroyed, in essence it was about practically undefended targets.

A year later, the Ukrainian security forces are not only resisting the Russian invasion, but now equipped with a large amount of modern weapons, most of which came from NATO countries, they are planning a major offensive and even the return of Crimea.

Implementation of the idea of 'military dominance'

Back in the early 1950s, the then top of the USSR made a series of political decisions that were meant to match Western countries in industrial development, and above all in the development of the military industry. The Cold War was not yet "cold". At that time, both the West and the East were still working to repair the consequences of the Second World War, but Joseph Stalin, as well as the entire top of the Communist Party, was convinced that through the development of military factories, primarily steel mills and foundries, and the guarantees of the state itself, hundreds of thousands of jobs in a very short time.

The USSR desperately needed those jobs, since, due to the enormous destruction and the large number of victims, hunger reigned in most of the country, and unemployment was almost 50 percent. This did not fit with the proclaimed "communist utopia" and the progress of the "working people", since a huge number of workers did not have real employment. The Warsaw Pact, created in 1955, which, in addition to the USSR, also included seven communist countries of Eastern Europe, gave a big blow to this idea of the military industry as an engine of development.

Although Stalin died in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev continued to implement the idea of "military domination". Practically overnight, the USSR created a huge market for its military industry through the so-called Committee for Economic Cooperation and access to vast raw materials and resources. By the beginning of the 1960s, the USSR was producing and exporting weapons, planes, tanks and other military equipment for almost 11 billion dollars a year.

In the following decades, the Soviet military industry will permeate all sectors of society. At one point between 1964 and 1967, more than 30 percent of all employees in the USSR either worked directly in the military industry or in factories that produced items for the army. This gave enormous political and economic power to generals and high-ranking officers, who often influenced the political moves of the Kremlin.

Generals became businessmen overnight

Constantly warning of "inevitable NATO nuclear attacks and invasion plans", the Soviet generals managed to get almost half of the Soviet budget for their factories and equipping their units. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were more than two million active officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers, and another five million soldiers in permanent reserve, while all adult males were conscripts.

Also, at the time of disintegration there were more than 1,400 active ballistic missiles and more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, distributed in 28 large bases and more than 300 smaller bases, barracks and command centers. After the collapse of the USSR, many military bases and airfields, especially those in the Far East and Western Siberia, suddenly lost their strategic importance, and officers were retired overnight.

Although it was planned that all military equipment would be returned or moved to central Russia, due to lack of money and political disagreements between the former republics and the political leadership of Boris Yeltsin, this never happened. In the early nineties, the Kremlin was focused on the "big catch", primarily the return of a large number of fighters and bombers from Ukraine, as well as its nuclear weapons.

In 1991, bases in Ukraine housed at least 2,411 nuclear warheads, 820 ballistic missiles in various stages (mostly SS-20 "Pioneer" and RT-21M). Since Kiev, now the capital of an independent state, had no control systems or launch codes themselves, all these ballistic missiles were practically useless.

Brutal violation of the "Budapest Memorandum"

After the Lisbon Treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons from 1992 and the return of the nuclear arsenal from Belarus and Kazakhstan to Russia, Ukraine also began to return warheads and missiles, but with one condition - that Russia fully respects the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine and that undertakes not to carry out hostile military actions against its neighbor. It was formally signed in 1994, creating the "Memorandum from Budapest". Two decades later, Russia will violate practically all provisions of this agreement by illegally invading and annexing Crimea.

During the 90s and early 2000s, huge amounts of Russian weapons ended up in African and Asian countries. Former generals and high-ranking officers became businessmen, with companies dealing in arms trade. Since a large number of countries around the world already had Russian tanks and planes, it was necessary to provide their maintenance and spare parts. This time it was mostly done by Russian private companies.

Although there is no accurate data (or Russia is strictly concealing it), between 1993 and 2005, weapons worth at least 40 billion dollars were exported in various ways, with another 8.3 billion "legal" dollars for the maintenance of Russian systems in other countries. The United Nations estimates that during the 1990s, at least three million people around the world died from weapons originating from the former USSR.

Annual turnover between eight and 11.5 billion dollars

After Vladimir Putin came to power, the export of Soviet weapons was reduced to a minimum, but not out of "good intentions". By then, a large number of these weapon systems were already "for scrap" or mostly obsolete. Putin, like his Soviet predecessors, saw this as an opportunity to restore former Soviet weapons factories and build new ones.

In the last two decades, the Russian defense industry employs between three and 3.5 million people and participates with about 20 percent of the total production in the country. Only one of the large defense concerns Sevmash (Northern Dvina Machine Industry) employs almost 25,000 workers. The first 30 such companies have an annual turnover between eight and 11.5 billion dollars, although the real figures are a secret, since the largest customer is the state itself.

Russia, along with China, the USA and France, is one of the largest exporters of weapons, in first place of personal weapons, airplanes and helicopters, such as those from the MiG concern, and the Ka-50 and Ka-52 Alligator. The countries with the largest number of Russian weapons systems are Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, Algeria, India, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan.

Over the years, this much representation of the military industry has inevitably led to a high degree of corruption. European analysts state that the control of the military budget in Russia is relatively small and that all large procurements, whether for the domestic army or for export, practically arrive from the Kremlin "already contracted", often in the international contacts of Putin himself and his advisers.

This development of the situation led to open conflicts in the Russian high command, so Putin was forced to replace several prominent commanders in the field and generals in the Ministry of Defense. And Putin's former "right-hand man" Dmitry Rogozin, after open criticism of Russian generals and the Kremlin's moves in Ukraine, was dismissed from the position of director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos (which also manages the military satellite communication system).

In addition to all this, in the middle of last year, on the Russian social network VKontakte, videos of Russian soldiers in the field began to appear, showing food stamps that expired in 2015. Some of the units received even older foodstuffs, which expired in 2008.

Private companies associated with Yevgeny Prigozhin

Russian General Gennady Zhidko stated in the middle of last year that "many supply channels in Ukraine actually function through private companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin". Prigozhin is also the founder of the private military group Wagner, which is also fighting in Ukraine, alongside regular military units. Prigozhin retaliated, accusing several high-ranking generals of "cowardice and high treason".

In December of last year, the Ukrainian security forces presented intelligence that "Russian units in the field often receive half as much fuel as requested". This is an old problem within the Russian army, and it was also noted during the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and in Syria at the Tartus base, when in 2018 the rescue of Russian soldiers from Tel al-Harra was called off because the helicopters did not have fuel of the appropriate quality.