Let the hunt for scapegoats begin! In the wake of repeated military disasters in his “special military operation” in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has begun a sweeping purge of his top ranking commanders, the UK’s Defence Ministry announced today. This confirms ongoing rumors that Putin’s playing musical chairs in an effort to reverse a series of humiliations at the hands of Volodymyr Zelensky and his surprising home army:

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 19 May 2022

Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/qqKi2Uagzx

🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/1JYJHtSWRT

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) May 19, 2022

So who’s out so far? Follow the Twitter thread to see, but I’ll sum up:

• Lt. Gen. Serhiy Kisel relieved of command from 1st Guards Tank Army for the loss of the battle of Kharkiv
• Vice Admiral Igor Osipov relieved of command from the Black Sea fleet for the loss of of the Moskva
• Chief of General Staff Valeriy Gerasimov remains in place but apparently bypassed by Putin

That’s all that the UKDM has in specific changes, but it’s enough. What do all of these have in common? A tacit admission, at the very least, of the defeats inflicted on Russian forces by Ukrainians. Up to now, Russia has pretended that the Moskva didn’t get sunk but rather had some sort of accident that crippled the ship. They haven’t yet even acknowledged getting pushed away from Kharkiv, for that matter. You don’t fire commanders in the middle of a war for an accident and a retreat that never took place. And you don’t sideline your top and most trusted military leader if the war is going well.

That brings us to the broader tacit acknowledgement: Russia is getting its rear end kicked in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean they’re losing the war, but they’re clearly not winning it. The new weapons coming into Ukraine have negated the one advantage that Russia had in the first three months — artillery range — which means that the playing field is more equal now. That means that the morale and home-field advantages that the Ukrainians enjoy will have more of an impact in the long run, especially with Russian logistics still as fouled up as they are even after three months of warfare.

As the UKDM notes, the clear hunt for scapegoats to cover for Putin’s colossally stupid decision to invade Ukraine won’t improve matters for him. The Russian military already has “a culture of cover-ups and scape-goating,” and this will only amplify that into a general military paralysis:

(7/7)This will likely place further strain on Russia's centralised model of command and control, as officers increasingly seek to defer key decisions to their superiors. It will be difficult for Russia to regain the initiative under these conditions.

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) May 19, 2022

What this will mean in reality, assuming that British intelligence on this matter is accurate, is that operational decisions will increasingly get kicked all the way upstairs to Putin himself. Rumors that Putin has begun taking that kind of personal command of military units have emerged in recent days, and that itself is a supremely bad sign for Russian fortunes. It’s not just that Putin has no experience in operational military command, although that’s certainly the case with this former KGB colonel. A military campaign has too many moving parts and too many moment-to-moment changes to be effectively run remotely by one person. It’s the military version of the problems noted by F.A. Hayek about central economic planning in his seminal book The Road to Serfdom. The levels of complexity in military campaigns make that kind of remote, centralized operational control (as opposed to strategic direction) all but certain to fail.

And what happens in Hayek’s model when those failures occur? A series of increasingly brutal and ruthless leadership changes, which ends up making the situation worse, which then forms a culture of corruption. That’s bad enough in an economic system, and deadly in that context too — just as it was in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Maduro’s Venezuela. It’s calamitous in a military context, as proven by Adolf Hitler on the eastern front in World War II when the Soviets finally began to overwhelm Nazi troops. Only the toadies remained to tell Hitler what he wanted to hear while his armies collapsed on both sides of Germany.

The same will happen in Russia as a result of these purges, when the real error here was launching the war in the first place. That will freeze the Russian tactical operations, leaving troops exposed in some places and failing to properly coordinate in others as Putin arranges his pieces on a chessboard he doesn’t properly comprehend at all. Delays in orders will prove fatal, as the situations will have changed too much in the delay for the orders to be effective, even assuming they’re intelligent in the first place.

Meanwhile, anyone who is competent to recognize the disaster will look for a way out, leading to a serious brain drain from this brainless war. One Russian politician reportedly found a novel way out, via the Daily Wire:

Vladivostok city councillor Viktor Kamenshchikov resigned from the Communist Party on February 28 in protest against the invasion. Now he has apparently been arrested while trying to cross the Mexico-US border. He reportedly has a child with US citizenship due to birth. https://t.co/LX6payUgkX

— X Soviet 🇺🇦 (@XSovietNews) May 19, 2022

This sounds too good to be true, but it’s at least plausible. Maybe DHS should have a separate Russian defector station along the Rio Grande.