"The key principle of the Russian military is that violence is good and widely accepted": Russian investigative journalists on the situation among the occupation forces in Ukraine

He was brutally beaten and forced to make a humiliating statement on camera confirming Wagner's claim that he was captured after his soldiers attacked Wagner's troops, Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, co-founders of Agentura.ru and Russian investigative journalists who have already monitored by the Russian security services for several decades.

The video went viral on Telegram channels associated with mercenary leader and ex-convict Yevgeny Prigozhin – and was met with total silence from the Russian military leadership. The following month, Prigozhin launched his "march of justice", Wagner captured the main capital of Rostov-on-Don and marched towards Moscow, while, they say, the Russian army remained inactive.

 

What followed was an infamous video call between Prigozhin and Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Deputy Chief of the General Staff Vladimir Alekseyev at the headquarters of the Southern Military District, where Alekseyev, actually the head of the conflict intelligence service, laughed at the idea of Prigozhin and his rebels to abandon Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

“You can have them!” he said. Then on July 13, the commander of the 58th Combined Arms (CAA), a front-line group in Ukraine, Major General Ivan Popov, issued an audio statement attacking Gerasimov and accusing the army's high command of treason. (Popov was relieved of command as a result of this dispute)

These are clearly significant events and tell a fascinating story about the upper echelons of the Russian military. Kremlin forces are visibly bickering and engaging in public disputes over the tactical and sometimes strategic conduct of the war.

Senior officers are being killed in missile strikes, questions are being raised about how their locations were leaked, treason is being suggested, and meanwhile reports are emerging that much of the command structure—perhaps as many as 30 officers—has been arrested or relieved of command.

 

And yet, the Russian army is not about to collapse. Whatever the state of morale in the invading army, it is not ready for complete collapse. The Russian army may fight ineffectively, and have serious setbacks, but it will continue to fight.

To understand this issue, Western observers should realize that the Russian military has operated under very different standards for generations.

The key principle is that violence is good and widely accepted. It is seen as a means of maintaining discipline among the soldiers - in this case it is called nepotism or freezing, usually carried out by more experienced soldiers against younger recruits, and encouraged by officers who are content to rely on bullying given that they are non-commissioned officers. ranks too low.

If violence is committed by officers, including generals, it is called sleight of hand — assault.

Shouting and shouting is practiced even in the most professional elite Russian military units, such as the Spetsnaz special forces. Six months before the full-scale invasion began, two commanders of the 14th Special Forces Brigade were accused of raping soldiers.

 

The scandal was so big that the brigade could not keep it a secret, so an official investigation was launched. Physically assaulting a fellow officer as a means of imposing discipline (an act strictly prohibited by the codes of the armed forces, for example the US and British armies) was used by none other than General Sergei Surovikin, the most prominent Russian general in the war against Ukraine who was accused of assaulting a subordinate officer in 2004.

Such behavior is apparently not the end of his career (unconfirmed reports say that Surovikin was arrested for his connection with the Wagner Rebellion).

Acceptance of violence within the ranks is hardly something that emerged under Putin. In the second half of World War II, the highly decorated Marshal Rodion Malinovsky was summoned to Georgy Zhukov, the most outstanding Soviet general of the war. These were not the disastrous days of 1941, and victory was already palpable, but Malinovsky went to the meeting with Zhukov with a heavy heart:

"Knowing what Zhukov is like, I went with the intention. . . if he scolds me — I would scold him, if, God forbid, he hits me — well, I'll hit him back," wrote Malinovski in his memoirs.

Stalin purged the Red Army, killing the most capable officers, but he too can hardly be blamed for the violence in the army.

The memoirs of Soviet Marshal Semyon Budyonny, the Red Army's most decorated cavalry officer, tell how his outstanding performance during World War I earned him a Knight of the George Cross, Russia's highest military award, four times.

 

There would have been five of them, he said, but he was denied that because of physical attacks on his comrades, comrades in the Imperial Army, who were fighting the Germans at that moment. This did not harm Budgioni's career in the Imperial Army or the Red Army.

Violence within the ranks was supplemented by the promotion of unthinking obedience to the orders of higher commanders and the brutal discouragement of individual initiative. Challenging the commander is not allowed, even if his behavior is irrational, criminal, or puts the troops in danger.

Popov, the commander of the 58th CAA, was fired because he raised with Gerasimov the issue of ineffective anti-battery fire against what he described as devastating Ukrainian artillery fire.

This combination does not make the Russian army the most professional army. But that makes it a formidable fighting force because the level of casualties accepted in the Russian army is much higher than in any modern army in the world.

That level is universally accepted — both by the officer corps, and by soldiers, and by relatives, and by society as a whole. The only attempt by civil society to introduce accountability for the military was made during the First Chechen War when soldiers' mothers formed the Soldiers' Mothers Movement - but this initiative was quickly crushed by the Ministry of Defense many years ago.

Society has also traditionally accepted a thick cloak of secrecy surrounding the military, even knowing that behind it lies an almost absolute license for commanders to do whatever they want to their men.

Western observers tend to focus on historical examples of when the Russian army failed, namely in 1917, making the revolution possible. But the Imperial Army was not the only army to mutinied during the Great War – the French Army saw 68 mutinies in its 112 divisions, but the French Republic survived. Therefore, this historical reference could be counterproductive.

Another example that is constantly cited is the unprecedented number of defections during World War II — when thousands of Red Army soldiers and officers surrendered to the Wehrmacht in the first and second years of the war.

But fixating on that example has already led to poor judgments about the true nature of the military. A Russian dissident movement in exile in the 1980s responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by forming a movement called "Resistance International" to encourage the defection of Soviet soldiers.

They distributed leaflets, used a radio frequency, and even printed a fake edition of Red Star, the newspaper of the Soviet army. They believed that the defection would help defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan, and that it could lead to the collapse of Soviet power.

"Ultimately, our joint efforts helped move 16 defectors from Afghanistan to the West," noted dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, the mastermind behind Resistance International, admitted to the authors of this article. Apparently, the strategy failed.

Nor has the war in Ukraine caused a large number of refugees, and the reason is the same - the war is being fought on foreign territory, and the fighters are promised to return home and a good package of money: so there is no real incentive to change sides.

The Russian army cannot be judged by Western standards because, despite the low morale of the troops and the passivity of the officers, the Russian army is ready to pay a much higher price.

"Now we just need a victory, one for all of us - at any cost," says a popular song from the Soviet film Belorussia Station about the Great Patriotic War. And these days that means we simply don't care how many soldiers die.