This one is so hard for me to imagine, given Russia's long history of aerospace pride and massive military budget. The article attributes it to limited flying time compared to US/UK pilots and unfamiliarity with their latest and most advanced jets. Truly hard to comprehend how a military like Russia's could be suffering from lack of training despite a multi-year lead-up to a massive invasion.

Can you imagine US or western Europe soldiers doing something similar en masse?

And its not just that - heavy drinking, fuck-it attitude, and suddenly called to invade the nation who was supposed to be their closest brothers?

They are sort of potemkin village kind of army. Few exceptional units (Spetsnaz), few cool technologies ie anti aircraft missiles, literally maybe 10 new Armata tanks (they found out they can't manufacture them en masse). So you see 40-50 years old tanks which Javelin can fry easily, and even clueless civilian can fire them after 30 minutes of training. You see soldiers abandoning vehicles since they have higher survability on foot. You see tank crew coming to Ukrainian police station to ask where is gas station (I call it clever way to surrender).

I think its actually very dangerous for Russia as a state right now. Showing this much weakness might motivate some neighbors. Especially China, they could run through the country all the way to Barents sea without breaking a sweat.

To which I say: Russia has ~half of the world's nuclear arsenal. (The US has ~half, the rest of the nuclear states are mere footnotes by # of nukes, relying on the fact that no one really needs more than about a dozen).

If this is the state of their conventional military, it raises questions about the state of their nuclear deterrent.

In any case, if China wanted Siberian resources, fomenting a breakaway region would be cleaner than invading.

A scary fucking thought. i.e. some of them will stay in silos, but others will be partially airworthy.

>In any case, if China wanted Siberian resources, fomenting a breakaway region would be cleaner than invading.

This would result in a nuclear exchange.

Possibly. But the exchange would occur on Russian soil. China is more than capable of covertly supporting separatists. Hell, it might not even have to. Just prime the pump and then let the West take over.

The thing is though, is there any reason to believe the PLA would be in a much different shape? The last wars the Chinese fought in were decades ago, and the performance was pretty poor. So we don't have any real world idea of how that army would perform - it could suffer from poor morale, stupid tactics, lack of coordination, no logistics, or it could be superbly trained with great equipment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayq2WTOIOAQ&t=2964s

Well, it's not as if the US military industrial complex has nothing of that?

I think the problem isn't corruption alone, but the combination of corruption and all the corrupt trying hard to put their own eggs elsewhere than Russia's basket. Working with a corrupt authoritarian leader can be profitable, but you really want to have a plan B for when SHtF.

US corrupt elites have the luxury problem that if their wealth and power isn't secure in the US, it probably isn't very secure anywhere else either. So they have to take just a little care not shit where they eat (too much), and maybe sponsor a few museums and stuff, robber baron style.

A good (extremely depressing) film to watch is "Leviathan" (2014).

I agree there's probably less of the "money just unaccounted for" type of corruption in the US (though it does happen, especially in connection with wars and intelligence agencies), and certainly less petty bribes. But that may just be a symptom of more organized corruption, so that it isn't necessary to let to many lower instances have a cut. In short, there may be more legal ways to divert public trust to private gain, so that the petty sort is just pointlessly risky.

Except Hong Kong (and the "expansion" of the South China Sea).

France and Germany aren't far behind - 52.8 billion and 52.7 billion respectively. I believe Germany recently pledged to raise it's military spending to 100 billion (a lot of flashy headlines but couldn't find details), so soon it will far outspend Russia.

Not to 100 billion, by 100 billion. Euros that is.

https://www-tagesschau-de.translate.goog/inland/innenpolitik...

Germany will have greater personnel cost, yes. In other areas, Russia will have a greater cost burden. For example, they don’t share defense resources with other nations (I.e. no. NATO equivalent).

The person you’re replying to is simply stating that Germany’s higher personnel cost does not nullify the effectiveness of relative strength of the German military versus the Russians.

Not when you pay for corruption :)

This is exactly the metric. Unlike their other assets, planes are expensive to replace and pilots take a long time to train.

Russia needs to maintain their air assets in order to defend themselves in case they get challenged that way. And they have tons of warm bodies and old hardware to throw at the situation.

Another perspective is that Russian air assets are very vulnerable to MANPADS style air-defense systems. Ukraine has received a ton of these systems from the west and are able to engage targets up to about 3 miles out. They're also vulnerable to the S300 systems the Ukrainians inherited, although its not clear how many of those remain.

Outside of cities, where alternatives to air strikes are viable, you can still see a lot of russian helicopter and artillery action.

Those need targeting. And the article mentions a lack of targeting pods. (UkrAF is largely functional because the initial volley missed many air fields, planes and radar systems.)

This increasingly looks like the Russian military procured shiny, expensive kit from cronies and then neglected to equip them.