A follow-up to Ed’s post earlier. It’s one thing to have your son sent to fight in a foolish war. It’s another to have him sent there on false pretenses, with the assurance that he was mobilizing for “training.” And it’s another still for him to find out on the battlefield that the army is a fraction as effective as he believed it to be due to breathtaking amounts of graft at the top.

This is one small incident but every great movement has to start somewhere:

🔴Angry Russian mothers have accused Vladimir Putin of deploying their sons as "cannon fodder" in his invasion of Ukraine

Read more here👇https://t.co/G1kd8kcedA pic.twitter.com/Kd4fB6tG1v

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 7, 2022

“It will end very soon,” the governor assures his audience. He’d better hope not. Because there’s no scenario in which this ends soon yet ends well for Russia.

Realistically, there’s no scenario in which it ends soon yet ends well for Ukraine either. But if you squint, you can imagine the combination of economic strain at home and logistical nightmares on the battlefield growing so burdensome that the Russian army begins to break down. They’re two weeks in and have already reached this point:

Russian troops have now been spotted using some of the requisitioned civilian vehicles as troop transports.👇 pic.twitter.com/GXN2B8lw0I

— Jimmy (@JimmySecUK) March 8, 2022

Ret. Gen. Mark Hertling read the reports yesterday of Russian soldiers needing to use conventional phones to call in the death of one of their generals and marveled at the “staggering” logistical incompetence it suggests. Today the Times reports on the recent whispering within eastern European militaries that the Russian bear doesn’t seem as fearsome as they had been led to believe. “If you look at what’s on the other side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore,” said one Estonian officer.

[A] dissection of the Russian military’s performance so far, compiled from interviews with two dozen U.S., NATO and Ukrainian officials, paints a portrait of young, inexperienced conscripted soldiers who have not been empowered to make on-the-spot decisions, and a noncommissioned officer corps that isn’t allowed to make decisions either. Russia’s military leadership, with Gen. Valery Gerasimov at the top, is far too centralized; lieutenants must ask him for permission even on small matters, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

In addition, the Russian senior officers have proved so far to be risk-averse, the officials said…

“Most Russian capabilities have been sitting on the sidelines,” said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a defense research institute, in an email. “The force employment is completely irrational, preparations for a real war near nonexistent and morale incredibly low because troops were clearly not told they would be sent into this fight.”

Poor organization is half the equation. The other half is corruption:

2. Russian military. The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military

— Andrei V Kozyrev (@andreivkozyrev) March 6, 2022

Kozyrev was Russia’s foreign minister under Boris Yeltsin. The man who was tasked by Putin with modernizing Russia’s military is Sergei Shoigu, a top crony who was made defense minister and a general of the army despite never having served as a professional soldier. Shoigu is so exalted a figure in Russia that he’s been touted as a successor to Putin himself. What two weeks of war in Ukraine have revealed is that his modernization effort may have been essentially an elaborate front for Russian military leaders to line their pockets with money that was supposed to go for modern weapons, training, and communications systems. More from Politico:

Early on in the invasion, there were accounts indicating that some Russian soldiers received rations that had expired in 2015. Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. Several years ago, Prigozhin’s companies were accused by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of forming a cartel and gaming the state’s bidding system for defense orders, receiving contracts for several hundred million dollars. The quality of food and housing in the Russian military is reportedly worse than in its prisons, with unreasonably small meals and some carrying harmful Escherichia coli bacteria.

There are also reports that Russian advances in Ukraine were slowed by lack of fuel — and this in a country rich with oil and gas. But ineffective control over fuel consumption in the Russian military actually long preceded the war in Ukraine and had historically created opportunities for embezzlement — that is why fuel is often called the Russian military’s “second currency.” It is plausible that the long-standing tradition of corruption in fuel supply decreased the pace of Russian advancement in Ukraine.

It is also important to remember that the weapons currently targeting Ukraine were produced despite this level of corruption. Meanwhile, many technological innovations, including those that could increase the precision of Russian strikes, have never materialized due to graft, embezzlement and fraud.

“Recent investigations show that top officials in the Russian Defense Ministry own property that significantly outmatches their income,” author Polina Beliakova notes. It’s anyone’s guess whether Shoigu himself failed to understand the state of the military and was misled by his own deputies or whether he understood the situation but couldn’t muster the nerve to level with Putin about it as the tsar fantasized about absorbing Ukraine. All in all, it’s a textbook case of the pathology of autocracy, diminished by its own predations and fondness for yes-men.

Which returns us to the question: Does Ukraine have a chance here?

Probably not. Presumably Russia will be able to brute-force it out in the end, costing an extravagant number of Russian soldiers’ lives in the process and even more Ukrainian ones. But there’s no way this ends with a Russian victory “very soon.” The closest thing to that would be Russian giving up on its dream to take all of Ukraine, writes strategic studies professor Phillips O’Brien, and instead focusing on seizing a corridor in the south between Crimea and the Donbas. Southern Ukraine is where Russia has had its biggest success so far. They might be able to catch the Ukrainian tiger there. But how long can they hold it?

The sanctions will still be in place and biting. Morgan Stanley is expecting a Russian default in April. https://t.co/zMP30DEDzF

— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 8, 2022

The Russian invasion force (presumably some of the best units in the Russian Army) would be spent having suffered major losses in all categories.

— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 8, 2022

Any annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia would presumably mean that the west’s punishing sanctions would remain in place indefinitely, further afflicting the country’s economy and degrading Russia’s defensive capabilities. How much can a country thrust into autarky meaningfully threaten its neighbors, particularly with NATO as united as it’s ever been? It’s a fiasco. And it’s only going to get worse.

Some brave Russians like the woman in the clip are willing to say so, too. See this thread for other high-profile examples. Polling in Russia is sketchy at best but one new survey finds 58 percent support for the war compared to 91 percent support for the seizure of Crimea in 2014. Small online polls conducted by a firm tied to dissident Alexi Navalny have also claimed to find Russian support for the war weakening over the past two weeks:

4/14 We can observe rapid shifts in the evaluation of Russia’s role in the war. The share of respondents who view Russia as the aggressor doubled, while the share of those considering Russia a “peace-maker” halved. pic.twitter.com/Rw7ORosVpH

— Alexey Navalny (@navalny) March 8, 2022

It’s probably wishful thinking. The pressure from relentless propaganda and oppressive state censorship laws means Russian opinion will be an exceptionally tough nut to crack. But as the number of Russian boys who are MIA in Ukraine grows, so will public awareness about the hard reality about the toll of the war.