This holds in both China and Russia.
This has nothing to do with the reality of the Russian military on the ground.
Surely, the Iraq invasion was over so fast exactly because so much of the Iraq military did not want to die to defend Saddam Husein.
The will to fight is so asymmetrical in Ukraine. Surely, the Russian military is not oblivious to what the world thinks of this. So one side is willing to die to defend their country and the other side probably just wants to get back home alive and get this over. The Russians also can't just level every city to the ground and call that victory. They have to break the will of the people without destroying everything.
It is a recipe to lose the war even if you win some battles. The Russian path to victory is extremely small and maybe even impossible in this situation.
That matters more IMO than what the military brass thinks.
Watch the inner circle security council meeting in Russia for some idea of how afraid everybody is of him.
In the US, the needs of the individual outweigh the needs of the many. In China, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. If an individual or a group is disrupting the collective good, they need to be managed.
China has done amazingly well for improving the general welfare. It was a very poor country until just a few decades ago. Extreme poverty is on-track to being eliminated, if it hasn't been already (depending on where you place the threshold). Thing like access to housing, food, and medicine are improving. Schools are excellent.
Once you have those basic needs met by everyone, China seems to be moving onto handling issues like stress; the human load of the progress, in terms of work weeks, was tremendous, and China is trying to curtail that, perhaps not to Western standards, but to something manageable.
China has increasingly started cracking down on corruption too.
It has problems, and I'm not trying to downplay those, but it's not Russia, where an oligarchy is draining and bankrupting the general population for their own betterment.
If you are Russian and reading this, fight to end authoritarism in your country.
sadly it's a lot more nuanced :(
-- (apologies for x-posting this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30477618) --
Russia had some trouble[1] recruiting for this mission. Pay is a joke, and they had to hire a bunch of aging convicts with nowhere else to go:
>> Two Meduza sources referred to the formations taking shape in the “people’s republics” as “Dirlewanger brigades,” because they actively enlist former inmates. “Those [joining up] in Luhansk were in prison,” said an individual personally acquainted with members of the new unit. “And then suddenly they turned up in this detachment. They’re real criminals, and besides that they’re no spring chickens [aged 45 and up].”
it gets worse:
>> Indeed, Meduza’s sources believe that those who accepted the recruiters’ offers likely have a rather low level of training. “All the rest are [on combat trips] in Africa or in the sands [Syria],” explained a Russian security agency veteran familiar with the recruitment campaign. “Nobody’s raring to go to the ‘field of spoil tips’ [the Donbas].”
>> “They just don’t want to go there, because there’s a regular army [the Ukrainian Armed Forces]: it’s difficult to fight against it,” said a former Wagner Group mercenary. “If there’s a regular army, there will be big losses.”
There is another[2] recent article that suggests Russians aren't going to Donbas/Luhansk voluntarily. If so it could explain the losses and shocking morale.
________
[1] A road to nowhere Russian recruiters are mobilizing mercenaries for a ‘trip to the Donbas.’ What they’re expected to do there remains unclear. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/12/23/a-road-to-nowhere
[2] ‘I’m panicking — where is my child?’ Conscript soldiers are being sent to fight against Ukraine, their relatives say. Here’s what their families told Meduza. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/02/26/i-m-panicking-where-...
The Russians were not told that it was a war of aggression; many probably did not realise it until they got there. Is desertion truly a reasonable option? Where are they going to go?
Likely the orders will be to shoot deserters. Even so the first desertions have already happened.
> Where are they going to go?
POW separate from the other POWs.
Edit: I have no doubt that there have been some desertions and I am sure that there will be more, but I am not sure that it is reasonable to expect that any given "scared kid" will do so even if they believe they are on the wrong side.
Beats being buried.
I noticed following in POW reels: there are no Russian POWs from Moscow, and central regions seemingly at all.
Scared Russian kids are fighting for crappy pay 1000's of km from their home against far more numerous people that are defending their families and their home country against an invader.
The Russian losses are already mounting, but obviously you won't hear about that inside Russia.