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By Kirill Shamiev 

“On a freezing winter dawn, a column of Russian troops moved through what the leadership in Moscow considered to be Russian territory. By midday, commanders were receiving alarming reports. In one town at the border, local fighters had stopped the column and burned and overturned 16 trucks. Later, another convoy was ambushed. Heavy casualties began to appear in the reports of military commanders. Soon, a special military operation that was supposed to be small and aimed at crushing an unfriendly political leadership turned into a long, bloody war with thousands of casualties that would change the Russian nation for years to come.”[1]

This story sounds remarkably familiar. But it is not from an early memoir of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is how Russian general Gennady Troshev described the beginning of the first Chechen war in December 1994.

But past is apparently prologue. In 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine, a country that Russian president Vladimir Putin often implies is part of Russia. The plan was for the Russian military, supported by Russian intelligence agents, to quickly decapitate the government and occupy the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Within hours of crossing the frontier, the first reports of military setbacks and casualties began to roll in. In just a few days, it became clear that the most recent special military operation would in fact be yet another long, bloody war.

Nearly thirty years have passed, and yet the Russian government seems to have repeated the same old mistakes in its most recent war. Prior to the war, many analysts thought that the Russian military had finally reformed itself and put its past failures behind it. Yet, the Russian military significantly underperformed in Ukraine in almost every domain – strategic, operational, and tactical. It failed to achieve its objectives and demonstrated remarkably little progress in planning since the Chechen wars. The extent of its struggles and failures took many analysts, including some Ukrainians, by surprise.

The Russian leadership was no doubt somewhat perplexed as well. In 2000, Putin’s long reign began with military tragedy. Just three months after his taking office as president, the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk exploded and sank in the Barents Sea, killing the crew of 118 sailors. The outcry was so massive that Putin himself had to take part in a clearly uncomfortable conversation with the families of the dead sailors. He promised the grieving relatives a smaller, better-equipped, more technologically advanced military. He has since devoted great effort throughout his tenure to improving the Russian military.

The effects of this effort are clear. From the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2021, the Russian defence budget almost tripled, from $22.84 billion to $65.91 billion (in 2020 US dollars). In those 22 years, Russia spent over $1.1 trillion on the military, had three full-term ministers of defence and four chiefs of the general staff who oversaw three military reforms, a short war with Georgia, an intervention in Syria, and several smaller deployments in former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet republics. Yet, when that military was finally tested in a full-scale conflict, almost nothing appeared to have changed.

Both Russian government and external military analysts have struggled to understand this persistent Russian military failure. Arguably, the issue is that analysts have paid too much attention to measurable factors – weapons, technology, doctrine, and training – and have neglected the more intangible factors such as morale, skills and leadership, which defy easy measurement.

This paper seeks to fill that gap. It starts from the idea that an adequate assessment of Russian military effectiveness must involve two interdependent aspects: material capabilities and the more difficult to quantify factors that lie at the interface between the civilian authorities and the military. These include Russia’s political and administrative institutions, the social norms that regulate military conduct, and military culture, all of which enable the development and use of military force. The paper seeks to explain the role of intangible factors in the Russian military’s failures and to derive lessons from the Russian military’s experience in Ukraine.

The essence of Russia’s military problems stem from the imbalances in Russian civil-military relations and the dysfunctional system of civilian control of the Russian military. Under Putin, the Russian administrative state has ensured the political compliance of the military but, far from enabling better training and equipping of the Russian armed forces, it has often hampered their development and deployment.

During his first eight years in power, Putin was reluctant to argue with the military and failed to support and enforce the reform measures he announced. Later, however, the Kremlin over-centralised political and military decision-making and installed intrusive monitoring and flawed evaluation mechanisms. Such mechanisms only work when the civilians have sufficient expertise to judge the military activities, yet Russian civilian leaders have rarely possessed the necessary skills.

Worse, the civilian reforms failed to break up the competing institutional silos within the Russian security sector, nor did they improve the skills of servicemembers. The reforms undermined Russia’s pre-war material advantages and played a significant role in preventing Russia from achieving success in Ukraine. Even Putin’s complete backing could not save Russian defence policies from the influence of stakeholders in the Ministry of Defence who sought to protect their various institutional interests, nor was Putin’s support sufficient to improve the quality of civilian leadership in the development of the military.

Russia’s poor battlefield performance in Georgia triggered a series of radical reforms in 2008-2012. These changes did improve the Russian military, as demonstrated in the seizure of Crimea in 2014, the hybrid war in eastern Ukraine after 2014, and the operation in Syria after 2015.

But Russian civil-military relations, the all-important interface between the Russian military and the civil authorities did not see effective reform and glaring problems remained. Before the war with Ukraine, for example, the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defence were not able to improve the human resource component of the military. Military officers lacked adequate training, including leadership and command skills, which undermined the adoption of innovative changes and the battlefield value of modern equipment. Ministry of Defence policies simply could not solve the military’s long-standing quality problems, such as unsatisfactory service conditions, intra-military brutality, corruption, waste, and poor tactical command and control skills.

A similar reform effort is likely after the war in Ukraine, given assessment of the Russian military emanating from a variety of voices, including pro-government Russian ones. Since 2022, many Russian servicemembers, military propagandists (voenkory), retired officers, and Russian analysts have published critical analyses and opinions on the state of the Russian armed forces. The technological revolution in open-source intelligence has provided valuable evidence of Russian battlefield performance, making a mockery of official Russian Ministry of Defence press briefings. Moreover, the sheer number of personnel and amount of equipment lost in Ukraine leaves little room for business as usual after the end of hostilities in Ukraine.

Such a mass of criticism on Russia’s war failures is unlikely to be dismissed by the political leadership in the Kremlin. They will attempt a reform. Previous experience demonstrates, however, that the ultimate outcome of any military reform will depend on improvements in Russian civil-military relations.

In fact, a few days before this report was released, the Kremlin appointed a new minister of defence, Andrei Belousov, dismissing Sergei Shoigu, who became the secretary of the Russian Security Council. Belousov has spent years in the Russian government and presidential administration overseeing the economic portfolio and before this he was an academic economist. Putin’s spokesman said Belousov was right for the job as the security services spend almost 7 per cent of Russia’s GDP, the military and civilian economies need to be better integrated. In the past, Moscow has appointed two previous ministers, Serdyukov and Shoigu, on a similar public pretext, but both of them simply implemented military reforms.

This paper seeks to understand how that reform might proceed. The first section examines Russian military effectiveness in Ukraine and proposes a framework for assessing the military’s performance. The second section explains how civil-military relations have affected Russia’s military effectiveness since 2000 and why so many challenges remain. Finally, the report concludes with the identification of key reforms in Russian civil-military relations.

Russian military effectiveness in Ukraine

“I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, are we firing on the advancing Ukrainians? Maybe NATO? Or are we attacking? Who’s being shelled like hell? Where did the rocket artillery come from? The referendum in the LDNR? The seizure of Kherson? Is Ukraine attacking us? Is NATO helping it? Either way, we must have some kind of plan.” – Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatiev, a Russian army deserter describing the first day of the invasion.[2]

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022. Russian forces entering Ukraine along four main routes: north, north-east, east, and south. The northern group invaded from Belarus and Russia, with the goal of taking over Hostomel airport and the city of Chernihiv. Possession of Hostomel and Chernihiv would have allowed Russian forces to surround Kyiv. The north-eastern group targeted Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. That city was supposed to be encircled, forcing Ukrainian troops to surrender. In the east, Russian forces and their Donetsk and Luhansk Republic proxies were to advance on the Donbas front. In the south, Russian forces would have split, occupying Kherson in the south-west and encircling Mariupol in the south-east.

So, there was a plan, but Filatiev was not alone in failing to understand it. The original strategy for the invasion was a high-risk operation and ended in failure. So profound was that failure that it effectively destroyed the pre-invasion Russian ground forces, forcing the Russian military to do what it has not done since the second world war: to reconstitute its forces with mobilised draftees, convicts, mercenaries, volunteers, foreign fighters, and to ban servicemembers from leaving the force.

Of course, a complex invasion of Europe’s second largest country could only be a monumentally difficult task. But it seems as if the Russian leadership did not really think it would be. Ukraine is about one-and-half times the size and population of Iraq (in 2003), Russia amassed at most 190,000 troops, compared to a US-led coalition force of 170,000 in the opening stage of the Iraqi invasion. Coalition ground forces advanced along a single major axis from Kuwait supported by 863 aircraft in the first month alone. Russia did it along five routes, without bothering to first achieve air superiority.

Ukrainian forces successfully halted the Russian advance, forced them to retreat from the north of the country, and by the end of October 2022, had liberated a large swathe of territory in the Kharkiv, Kherson, and Sumy regions. In response, Russia announced mobilisation, drafting up to 300,000 men, and formally annexed the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine. The special military operation transitioned from there into a long war of attrition. Mobilisation soon created a new Russian military that had little to do with the pre-war Russian military Moscow sought to develop. From a semi-professional military force, Russia shifted to a mobilised structure with a complex mix of hundreds of thousands of personnel from a wide variety of different backgrounds and experience – professionals, draftees, volunteers, and convicts – all supporting the war effort. 

This paper examines Russian military development before the full-scale invasion and its influence on the Russian performance in the first, pre-mobilisation, stage of the war. It seeks to understand why that pre-war Russian military development failed so spectacularly to create a military force and a military plan that could achieve the goals that Russian political leaders set.

Understanding military effectiveness

There are several analytical challenges in understanding military effectiveness. The first is that the effectiveness of armed forces is dependent on the context in which they are deployed. For example, the Russian operation in Syria was seen as relatively successful because the Russian military was able to achieve the military objectives of defeating terrorist groups and the Syrian rebels. The Russian contingent operated in a specific Syrian context in which its opponents had no air defence capabilities and the Syrian military, Russian mercenaries, military police, and special forces conducted ground operations. The lessons learned from the Syrian operation are thus not necessarily applicable to the war in Ukraine.

This paper adopts Risa Brooks’s approach to assessing military effectiveness, which does not depend on the specific battlefield context and focuses on the state’s capacity to use available resources for military development.Brooks defines military effectiveness as the ability of armed forces to generate military power using the resources of the state, such as wealth, technology, population size, and human capital.

In Brook’s definition, military effectiveness consists of four main attributes: integration, responsiveness, skill, and quality. An effective military is one that demonstrates high levels of these four qualities. The more integrated, responsive, and skilled a military is, and the higher the quality of its hardware, the greater its ability to leverage its basic resources for warfare.

Brooks’s framework recognises that the extent to which the government can develop its military effectiveness is determined in part by the nation’s institutions, cultural and societal norms, and social structure. Those societal features condition the influence of foreign and defence ministries, intelligence agencies, and military services, as well as the relations between those entities and political leaders in the policy process. The relations between those civil entities and the military or civil-military relations are, in Brooks’s schema a key determinant of military effectiveness.

The figure above represents the links between some of the elements of Russian military effectiveness. A lack of operational and tactical skills and necessary enabling equipment undermined Russian military performance in several key areas. The uneven level of organisational knowledge sharing and poor individual commander skills meant that Russian forces lacked the quality and organisational cohesion necessary to build a powerful military. This lack of cohesion in turn meant that Russian forces lacked the capacity to use their modern equipment effectively and led to the underdevelopment of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.

The practical inability to organise complex high-intensity military operations (in contrast to scripted exercises), the lack of proper tactical training, and serious procurement difficulties at the first stage of the war led Russia to poorly integrate its operational plan and combat tactics with the Russian government’s loosely defined strategic objectives. The Russian military also struggled to conduct combined arms operations and integrate different levels of military activity. The lack of knowledge sharing and learning within the military about the Ukrainian armed forces, combined with the limited reconnaissance and delivery of information about Ukrainian positions, undermined Russian responsiveness. However, on the individual level, Russian forces demonstrated the capacity for improvisation on multiple occasions and a notable integration with Russian civil society.

The following section examines each of Brooks’s elements of military effective in greater detail.

Skill

In Ukraine, the Russian military demonstrated that often it had incoherent skills and use of equipment. Accordingly, to increase its military effectiveness, the Russian military is currently focusing on increasing its skills, its ability to respond and to adapt to its opponent’s revealed strengths and its own weaknesses, and replenishing military equipment. The effectiveness of this development depends in large part on Russia’s civil-military relations that can either enable the necessary changes or undermine the reform process.

One of the reasons why Western analysts tended to overestimate Russian military capabilities is the performance of the Russian military in yearly strategic exercises showcased to foreign observers and the media. Many observers saw mechanised combined arms warfare in large formations as a strength of the Russian armed forces, especially when compared to Western armies that had focused on counter-insurgency. In the war with Ukraine, however, the Russian army did not demonstrate this capacity.

The Russian military showed an uneven level of organisational readiness and individual commander’s preparedness. In the Russian military, it is the diligence and competence of commanders that determine the level of readiness of their units. The quality of Russian tactical command during the first year of the invasion was inadequate. Tactical command is typically the responsibility of junior officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), but it is also heavily influenced by the availability of support and signal capabilities. During the initial stages of the invasion, Russian soldiers often seemed unprepared and unprofessional, while their vehicles frequently broke down.

Most interviewees for the author’s research agreed that the problem of tactical command stems from the system of education and training in the Russian military. That system consists of two pillars: (1) command structure training and (2) service and unit combat training. Command structure training is aimed at all headquarters as well as individual commanders responsible for command and control and specialised functions. The combat (tactical) training system targets battalions and smaller units down to the individual soldier (individual combat training). The Minister of Defence signs the annual military training plan, which is a key planning document for all the levels of the Russian command and control system (services, formations, units, including companies and platoons). As a rule, commanders assess the results of the training from the annual exercises, examinations, and control inspections.

This system therefore depends on the willingness and ability of the officer commanding a unit to organise training, obtain the necessary equipment and look after the welfare of his soldiers. However, the system of military higher education institutions (HEIs) is largely outdated and controlled by service headquarters, undermining the skills of junior officers and the overall integration of the Russian armed forces. There is often a lack of merit-based appointments in the higher education system, and service headquarters often appoint senior officers as heads of departments and research labs simply because they have a few years left before retirement and are on good terms with service headquarters or the leadership of the HEI. Teaching practices are outdated and often result in the written handbook being read as a lecture and the cadets having to memorise the slides. There is no independent assessment system for either the faculty or the cadets, as the military has had a shortage of junior officers for many years and accepted everyone who passed the minimal fitness exams.[3]

When a cadet becomes an officer, they find the same or an even worse system of training in the troops. In some units, it is easier to falsify the training system and manipulate control exercises due to enormous red tape or bribe inspectors than to run a functional system of military combat training. This also undermines the morale of the soldiers, as honest and personally committed commanders may face inertia or even hostility from their fellow officers. Less honest officers who fail to provide the necessary support (for example, ammunition and medicine) may then shift the blame for a more realistic but, on paper, imperfect exercise result onto these committed officers. The Russian education and training systems and hence command and control systems lack what the Russians call fool proofing (zashita ot duraka) – the systems cannot detect and remove intellectually unfit servicemembers.

“For three and a half months there have been no training sessions, unless you count the pre-jump additional training. There is an atmosphere of apathy among the contract servicemen and 90% of them discuss in the smoking rooms how fast the contract would end. Conscripts do not understand why contractors serve at all. I also heard from a number of officers that they do not want to serve here.”– Paratrooper Filatiev about peacetime training in a Russian Airborne (VDV) regiment.[4]

The Russian military lacks monitoring and accountability mechanisms in combat as well, as the case of the commander of the 205th brigade demonstrates. In that unit, the brigade’s leadership made several serious mistakes and harassed lower-level officers, but the Ministry of Defence initially launched an investigation against the whistle-blowers who had revealed the problems. Only after several waves of criticism from pro-Kremlin military bloggers did the Ministry of Defence decide to move the commander to a non-command post in the general staff.

The poor quality of education in Russian military HEIs and generally near absent continuous training or knowledge sharing with acting servicemembers effectively halted any exchange of knowledge and learning about the Ukrainian armed forces within the Russian military. This was despite the fact that hundreds of Russian servicemen had already had combat experience in Ukraine prior to the full-scale invasion.

Moreover, for reasons of operational security, officers and soldiers were kept in the dark until just days or even hours before the operation. This secrecy may have achieved a degree of surprise, but it also undermined the readiness of Russian troops to go to war. Unlike in military exercises, Russian troops did not know the terrain, the real-time location of friendly forces, or the status of the adversary, including a hostile civilian population. The decision to keep knowledge of the special military operation so closely held led to a series of avoidable command and control errors, deconfliction problems, and logistical challenges for the Russian military.

As a result, when Russian forces faced resistance for the first time, they simply fell apart. Then, to compensate for tactical losses, Russian forces began to rely on their massive artillery capabilities, which criminally devastated urban areas and inflicted massive damage on the Ukrainian military and civilian population.

Responsiveness

Failing to anticipate the war they had begun, the Russians showed varying degrees of responsiveness. Overall, the Russian government and military demonstrated a limited awareness of Ukrainian strengths and weaknesses as well as Russia’s own internal limitations.

Strategic responsiveness depended on Putin’s willingness to adjust his political priorities. In the first six months of the invasion, the Kremlin seemed to hope to defeat the Ukrainian military and avoid a politically costly mobilisation. When this failed, Moscow did adjust its priorities and allow the military to change its plans, but only after many costly mistakes and delays.

In the first six months of the war, despite retreating from northern Ukraine and sustaining casualties, the Kremlin opted for a costly and protracted assault in five regions of Ukraine. It resulted in devastating losses. The Ukrainians successfully exploited the lack of manpower on the Russian side and quickly recaptured a large part of their territory in the Kharkiv and Sumy counter-offensives. In Kherson, the Ukrainians forced the Russian military to retreat across the Dnieper River.

On 21 September 2022, the Kremlin made, rather late, a decisive strategic move and partially mobilised Russian society. The situation was so dire for the Russian military that some mobilised personnel were quickly sent to the front with little or no military training. These draftees were untrained and suffered high casualties, but they helped the military stabilise the front and prevent further Ukrainian counter-offensives.

The Russian military also adapted its tactics and unit structure, reflecting manpower issues and the strengths of Ukrainian defences. Instead of heavy battalion tactical groups, Russian forces began to use adaptable assault units and detachments designed for fortified defences and urban warfare. The assault detachments rely on downscaled assault platoons supported by mortar and artillery fire. Moreover, the Russian military better integrated tactical drones and quadcopters into its companies and battalions, including mortar batteries and artillery divisions. This innovation improved Russia’s situational awareness and allowed its commanders to conduct better integrated operations.

The Battalion Tactical Group (BTG) was Russia’s main combat formation, based on a reinforced motor rifle battalion, prior to the all-out invasion of Ukraine. It comprises about 500-700 servicemembers with three to four motorised companies, tanks, air defence, artillery, reconnaissance, and support units. The conceptual idea behind the BTG was to create a fully self-sufficient formation capable of acting autonomously. It proved ineffective in Ukraine due to consistent manpower shortages, equipment losses, and communication problems. 

An assault detachment is a small light infantry unit designed to conduct assaults on enemy positions. It is heavily equipped but lightly armored to prevent early detection and catastrophic losses due to anti-tank mines, artillery strikes, and missiles. The detachment can vary in size (from as little as three people to a squad of about 20 service members) but generally all of them are supported by artillery, mortar and fires from the rear during assaults.

Moreover, Russian military theorists now acknowledge that lightly armoured airborne forces are highly vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks that can negate any advantage in speed and lethality that the airborne forces are supposed to bring to the battlefield. They accordingly proposed a set of organisational and equipment changes. One is the experimental reintroduction of amphibious assault brigades within the combined arms armies, which the Soviet Union used extensively in Afghanistan for helicopter assaults into the enemy’s rear. Their role is to break the enemy’s defences in coordination with the frontal assault of the traditional motor rifle units.

Russian military commanders have also improved the military’s electronic warfare equipment, which jams Ukrainian military communications, missiles, and drones, including using civilian and privately made equipment. The Russian logistics support made adjustments, such as streamlining supply chains and relocating depots, which improved the delivery of basic critical resources, including the supply of artillery ammunition at the later stages of the war.

Russian volunteers and professional soldiers self-organised training in small unit tactics and tactical medicine for the mobilised personnel. The lack of institutional tactical medical preparation and the scarcity of official first-aid kits encouraged soldiers to seek support from civil society and organise knowledge-sharing within the unit. Even before the war, the Russian military had a poor reputation for medical care, with hundreds of soldiers contracting pneumonia every year.

Unable to provide the draftees with equipment, the Kremlin encouraged regional administrations and pro-government civil society organisations to purchase and supply non-lethal and dual-use equipment, such as tactical drones, night vision scopes, assault stocks, electric generators, radio stations, wheels, civilian 4×4 cars, combat apparel, and medical and personal protection equipment. Russian regional leadership and pro-war activists supported their mobilised compatriots (including via crowdfunding) and delivered the equipment to individual units on the frontline (see figure 3 below).

Screenshot

The Russian civilian government reacted swiftly to the crisis overall. In response to the collapse of tactical medicine in the first months of the invasion, the Duma amended the federal laws “On Defence” and “On the Fundamentals of Public Health Protection in the Russian Federation” in July 2022. In particular, the amendment focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of first aid provided to the servicemembers in combat and ensuring their health and safety during the war. It formalised first aid procedures and made the Russian Ministry of Defence responsible for developing and approving the list of conditions requiring first aid, the rules for its provision, and the standards for equipping first aid kits, bags, and sets of medical equipment. It also delegated the power to develop and approve first aid training programmes to the Russian Ministry of Defence.

In the same month, the Duma amended several laws regulating military mobilisation, including economic mobilisation, as well as in the sphere of demining. The Russian government was authorised to take special economic measures, including temporarily activating mobilisation capacities and private sector facilities, unsealing the banks of reserve equipment and materials, and changing legal regulations governing labour relations in certain organisations, such as rules on overtime, overnight, and holiday work, and the granting of annual paid leave. The amendment obliged enterprises to execute government orders on the procurement of goods and services required for the special military operation, potentially improving the speed of equipment production.

To support the war effort and restore Russia’s defence sector, the Russian federal government also launched the Coordination Council for meeting the needs of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, other troops, military formations and bodies on 21 October 2022. Prime minister Mikhail Mishustin, the chairman of the council, claimed that it would deal with the issues related to meeting the needs of the military during the war, including setting performance indicators for the supply of weapons and equipment, budgeting, selection of suppliers and contractors, and the creation of specialised infrastructure. The main objective of the Council is to improve civil-military cohesion, by enhancing the co-operation between the healthcare system, industry, construction, transport and other spheres and to increase coordination between federal executive authorities, regions, and special services during the war with Ukraine.

One of the most consequential changes is the set of changes relating to the integration of volunteer soldiers and units. In November 2022, new amendments to the federal law on defence regulated the use of volunteer formations for specific defence tasks. They allowed the Russian president to integrate volunteer formations into the Russian Ministry of Defence and the national guard, including changing the composition, organisation, areas of operation, objectives, leadership, duration, and other operational aspects of volunteer units, which could eventually include both Russian volunteers and servicemen. Volunteers were required to take the military oath upon joining the formation.

The amendments provided volunteers with the same welfare benefits as the rest of the armed forces. It includes provisions for welfare guarantees and compensation for volunteers and their family members not less than that of servicemen of similar rank.These amendments integrated volunteer formations into the Russian defence sector, providing them with legal, financial, and social support similar to that of regular military personnel. Volunteer formations played an important role in supporting the war effort, as they employed ideologically committed individuals who were usually better trained and equipped than the Russian Ministry of Defence rank and file.

Finally, in June 2023, new amendments to the law on education expanded the scope of vocational education and training (VET) and higher education (HE) for mobilised servicemembers. They establish a framework for the development of additional VET programmes and allowed mobilised servicemembers to enrol in the VET and military HE programmes. The bill regulates the training of mobilised servicemembers in basic and supplementary VET and HE programmes in educational institutions operating under the Russian Ministry of Defence, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and other federal executive bodies. These amendments will have lasting effects on the improvement of Russian military skills.

The legal developments in the Russian defence sector are, on the one hand, a symptom of how unprepared the Russian legal base was for a protracted military campaign. On the other hand, it shows that the defence system’s ability to react to the limitations and institutional problems is relatively functional.

Integration

Overall, the Russian military failed to integrate its strategic, tactics, forces, and intelligence. It struggled to maintain consistency in its operations and to create synergies between different levels of military activity. In terms of capabilities, the uneven levels of organisational and individual commander readiness indicate a lack of the organisational cohesion required to build a capable military, which is a critical aspect of military development.

Russia’s Achilles heel is the integration of intelligence and strategic assessment. Russia’s own doctrine has identified NATO as the primary adversary, emphasising the importance of rapid and widespread offensive action to overcome NATO’s superior combat capability. Russian planners have adopted a more focused approach to regional and local warfare, relying on targeted strikes rather than the large-scale ground operations typically carried out by the Soviet military. Russia’s doctrine holds that contemporary conflicts will involve:

• Massive use of weapon systems and military equipment, including high-precision, hypersonic weapons; weapons on new physical principles comparable in effectiveness to nuclear weapons (allegedly including non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons); electronic warfare systems; information and control systems, as well as unmanned aerial and autonomous naval vehicles and guided robotic weapons.
• The ability to hit the enemy simultaneously in the global information space, in the air, in space, at sea, and throughout the entire depth of the enemy’s territory.
• Large-scale attacks on multiple, selected targets; rapid maneuver of troops and lethal weapons systems; and the use of various mobile groupings of troops.

Therefore, some analysts, including the author of this report, expected that Moscow would conduct an overwhelming artillery and missile bombardment of command centres, air defences, airfields, and critical infrastructure, such as grids and power stations, before launching the combined arms operation.

In the event, however, none of this happened. Russian strategic planners appear to have believed that the Ukrainian government would retreat or be betrayed by its own population, that resistance would swiftly collapse, and that Russian troops would be welcomed as liberators. In the leading Russian Ministry of Defence journal, Military Thought (Военная мысль), Colonel O.G. Tukmakov, a lecturer at the Russian general staff academy, acknowledged the poor quality of Russian intelligence in the war strategy. The available data, according to Tukmakov, “assessing the socio-political situation in Ukraine” did not fully correspond to reality:

“Instead of flowers and bread, as we expected, local residents of Russian-speaking areas met the rear columns of our troops with civil resistance. Additionally, information about the moral and psychological state of the Ukrainian Armed Forces proved to be incorrect. The supposed expectations of their unpreparedness for armed resistance and mass surrender were unjustified.”[5]  

As the Chechnya vignette that opened this paper demonstrates, it is not the first time Russia has made this mistake.

In the case of Ukraine, investigative reporters claim that a small group of Putin’s trusted advisers and government leaders side-lined the general staff and drew up the invasion plan based on faulty assumptions and arbitrary political guidance. This may partly explain why the initial operation deviated from established principles of Russian military strategy and previous experience in eastern Ukraine, Syria, and annual combined arms exercises.

Both Chechnya and Ukraine illustrate the systemic problem with Russian intelligence and strategic assessment. In both cases, the political leadership in Moscow failed to read the adversary and Russia’s own limitations, which contributed to the unrealistic strategy and flawed launch of both wars.

The Russian intelligence services are critical to Putin’s hold on power, but they also control the president’s information flow. That position allows them to manipulate the evidence he receives. Various agencies such as the FSB, the foreign intelligence service, the federal protective service, and the main directorate of the general staff regularly report to the president and use this access to pursue their individual agendas, often tailoring their reports to Putin’s preferences. This manipulation of information serves as a powerful tool in shaping Putin’s decisions.

This problem is not uniquely Russian. Political decision-makers always need to critically assess incoming analysis and create institutions that reduce bias and improve the reliability of intelligence assessments. But in the Russian case, Putin’s politicisation of the intelligence services to ensure the security of his regime limits his capacity to improve the system.

Russian military integration also extended down into the initial forces that invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Despite the problems with intelligence and strategic assessment, the Russian military still vastly outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces around Kyiv during the first stage of the invasion. However, the quantity of Russian forces did not transform into quality due to the problems with integrating ground and air operations in a mutually supportive way. Russian airborne forces spearheaded the first stage of the invasion by launching an air assault on Hostomel airport near Kyiv. However, the operation stalled due to the Russian inability to suppress Ukrainian air defences and artillery systems.

On several occasions, Russian ground forces shot down friendly attack helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Russian pro-war telegram channels complained about the lack of ability of the ground forces to “clear the corridor” for the air force by targeting and destroying Ukrainian SAM systems, such as Soviet-made Buk and S-300 systems, and then later Western-supplied equipment.

Early in the operation, Russian forces also had difficulty establishing effective logistical arrangements in a highly mobile offensive operation. This was exacerbated by a lack of trucks, which particularly affected units far from railways. The complexity of the campaign, involving multiple axes of advance, initially overwhelmed Russian logistics, leading to severe resource shortages for combat units.

During the retreat from northern Ukraine back into Russia and Belarus, hundreds of soldiers refused to return to the battlefield. The problem began to be felt in the spring and summer of 2022 when some officers began to put insubordinate soldiers in homemade cages next to the front line. Combined with high attrition, Russian units had only about 20 per cent of their expected manpower by September before the stunning Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region. With the announcement of mobilisation in September 2022, the Kremlin banned soldiers from leaving the military.

Symbolically, Putin appointed the head of the Main Human Resources Directorate General Viktor Goremykin as the head of the main Political-Military Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defence in July 2022. He replaced General Andrey Kartapolov who had led the directorate from its inception in July 2018 to October 2021, when he became the Russian Ministry of Defence representative in the Duma. Neither Kartapolov nor Goremykin are specialists in military psychology, information warfare, or any other political-military related tasks. Goremykin, however, is a leading FSB representative (he graduated from the FSB Academy) in the armed forces, responsible for one of the pillars of civilian control – military education, recruitment, promotions, and appointments.

Goremykin served in the Main Human Resources Directorate from 2000 to 2022. Over the course of 20 years, he did not make any significant improvements to the education, recruitment, training, and appointment system in the Russian military, but he willingly carried out the wishes of all Russian defence ministers. He was replaced by General Yuri Kuznetsov, who had served in the security clearance directorate (the 8th Directorate, closely linked to the FSB) for many years.

Quality

The quality of equipment is also an endemic problem for the Russian military. Russia can design and develop modern equipment, but scaling up production is a daunting task for its government. Despite Russia’s military modernisation and improved capabilities, many technological advances, such as the T-14 Main Battle Tank or the Kurganets-25 Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV), have not been seen in combat. The Russian military had also lost key hardware, including anti-battery radars, T-90 tanks, and BMP-4 IFVs, which Russia is struggling to replace.

Yet, the key problem with the quality and availability of equipment was the lack of enablers used at the tactical and operational levels, such as night-vision and thermal imagers, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance equipment, encrypted and reliable communications systems, navigation equipment, mine-resistant and armoured recovery vehicles, and trucks with armoured cabins. Russian military scholars argue that reconnaissance was a crucial deficit given the high mobility and tactical autonomy of Ukrainian forces. Russian forces lacked awareness of the battlefield and the ability to quickly self-organise in a changing environment. The low quality of command at the first stage of the invasion that the report described above made the equipment shortage effects even more acute.

Despite Russia’s military modernisation and improved capabilities, most Russian soldiers used obsolete Soviet-era equipment. For example, Russian war-bloggers claimed that before the war, a Russian reconnaissance unit within a regiment on average had a few surveillance radars, binoculars, Soviet-era BRM-1k Korshun, and laser rangefinders. The Ukrainians also gradually shot down or jammed division- and regiment-level drones, such as the Orlan or Supercam, leaving the over-centralised Russian command structure practically blind. This blindness led to devastating tactical losses when Russian troops were ambushed by assaults as they attacked concealed Ukrainian positions.

Russian missile and cyber-attacks were not significant enough to have a strategic impact on the course of the war. The Main Computing Centre, a special unit of the general staff, determines cruise missile targets based on multiple sources of information, including satellite reconnaissance. However, space satellites are a weak spot of the Russian military. Their utility has been very limited, especially in terms of detecting moving objects and movements of the Ukrainian forces. Therefore, the accuracy of missile and air strikes remained limited due to poor reconnaissance, Ukrainian air defence, and technical malfunctioning.

On the other hand, the Russian (and Ukrainian) militaries quickly adapted to each other’s technological advantages on the battlefield. Russia dispersed its command posts and logistical hubs to avoid being hit by long-range precision strikes, and began producing guidance modules for its air-dropped munitions (UMPK), modernized its long-range missiles with electronic countermeasures and flares, began production of first-person view (FPV) drones, and procured Chinese tactical drones, radios, tactical vehicles and personal protection equipment.

As described above in the responsiveness section, thanks to crowdfunding and civilian donations, Russian forces received more rangefinders, including thermal scopes, fixed video cameras with night and thermal vision, listening devices, digital navigation tools, and tactical radars. Russian civil society also supported frontline units with first aid kits, cars, scopes, body armour, communications equipment, and anything else that could be bought on the civilian market.

However, the Russian government has yet to make systemic changes to improve its military procurement system and integrate the needed equipment into the official composition and training of the armed forces. As usual, a lot hinges on individual commanders and specialists in the Russian military while the Ministry of Defence and its subordinate organisations can hardly catch up with the adversary’s and its own field-level innovations.

Civil-military relations in Russia

This review shows that Russian military effectiveness remained quite low during the all-out invasion of Ukraine, especially during the initial stages. The obvious next question is why did a general awareness of persistent problems and serial reforms to solve them fail to improve Russian military effectiveness? 

The answer is that Russia’s lack of military effectiveness in Ukraine is, to a large degree, the product of unbalanced civil-military relations. At the heart of civil-military relations is the need to ensure that the military, as an organisation designed to “break things and kill people,” remains under civilian control while retaining the autonomy necessary for making professional military judgement and improving military effectiveness.

Russian civil-military relations have been complicated since the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no coup, or even a military coup attempt in that period despite a fairly autonomous military. Throughout the post-Soviet period, the civilian leader, be it Yeltsin or Putin, has maintained full political control of the armed forces, but that did not always translate into effective civilian leadership.

Russia’s lack of strong civilian leadership of the military is at the root of its military effectiveness problem. Strong civilian leadership does not guarantee successful reform, but it is a necessary condition for reform to happen. The quality of political leadership defines as the extent of committed support among key decision makers for a particular policy solution to a specific problem. In the Russian case, the president needs to appoint key decision-makers such as the defence minister and his deputies, including the chief of the general staff. These officials should share a common understanding of a problem, have incentives and sufficient resources to act, and sign off on official reform programmes, including monitoring and evaluation criteria for assessing results.

Sometimes, strong civilian leadership has to reduce the autonomy of its armed forces to force through necessary changes, other times it needs to increase it. Regardless, an autonomous military under weak civilian leadership will protect its institutional preferences too effectively, undermining military responsiveness to internal constraints and the dynamic external environment, as happened during the first eight years of Putin’s rule. A subservient military under weak civilian leadership is a stagnant force but if it doesn’t experience the test of combat, it can still satisfy the needs of the civilian leadership.

As the shown below, over this period the various Russian defence ministers oscillated between creating an autonomous military and more a subservient model. But in all cases the persistent lack of civilian leadership ensured that reform could not succeed.

Russian civil-military reform challenges

A prime example of a consistent problem with civilian leadership is the inability of the Russian government to solve the persistent problems in the Russian defence sector that revealed themselves yet again during the first year of the invasion. The tactical command of the Russian military was always deficient, mainly due to the limited skills and number of junior officers and NCOs, but also hampered by inadequate support and signal capabilities. Military officers and external analysis frequently criticised Russian poor situational awareness and organisational adaptability in the post-Soviet period. The lack of skills limited the military’s ability to maintain operational consistency and synergy between different units and undermined military cohesion.

Russia struggled to produce and integrate advanced military equipment and technologies, such as night vision goggles, battlefield integration systems and encrypted communication devices, due to limitations in its manufacturing infrastructure and electronics supply. The Russian military industrial complex and its lobbyists in the government actively resisted any attempts to import this equipment from abroad before the full-scale invasion. These deficiencies contributed to low morale and a general inability to engage effectively in the conflict.

However, the military was neither able to reform itself for most of its years, nor was it eager to give away its prerogatives in defence matters. Despite Putin’s success in building a personalist autocracy and crushing any dissent, the Russian armed forces have successfully protected themselves from what they see as excessive civilian influence.

In part because his presidency began with the Kursk disaster, Putin made military reform a key part of his overall effort to reform Russian governance. The Russian Defence Ministry initiated military reform in 2001, with the aim of improving Russia’s military capabilities in two main phases over the next eight years.

“We would always like more,” Putin said, disagreeing with the Ministry of Defence at his annual press conference, December 2003, “because today there are still many problems in the organisation of this work. Imagine: agreements on military contracts are usually signed in June, and only at the end of the year they start to disperse money under these contracts. Shipyards have already felt these injections, the Navy has given orders, but I don’t understand about aviation. Modern warfare is primarily about aircrafts, and the Ministry of Defence has put aviation in eighth place in its list of priorities.”

The original reform goals sound remarkably similar to what Russian officials will need today. Reform was supposed to improve the quality of combined arms operations, optimise command and control structures, and overhaul recruitment and mobilisation processes. However, there was a lack of consensus between the military leadership and the defence minister on reform priorities, with the former preferring rearmament and improving the socio-economic conditions of the troops before addressing structural changes within the armed forces.

Ultimately, the government lacked the capacity and resources to implement the necessary changes. The reform faced serious setbacks, including bureaucratic resistance, limited resources and resistance from the military elite. The then defence minister Sergei Ivanov was reportedly indecisive and reluctant to actively push the reform process. In addition, Putin avoided expending his political capital on radical reforms that risked alienating conservative segments of Russian society.

In response to the challenges of the first attempt at reform, the Kremlin shifted its strategy to increase civilian control and reduce military autonomy. During the 2004-2008 period, political authority over the military was increasingly centralised, fostering a culture of political compliance within the officer corps. Putin initiated the practice of appointing civilian defence ministers, thereby strengthening civil-military coordination and distancing the general staff from the presidential administration. These measures laid the groundwork for more comprehensive military reforms in the next phase. On the other hand, the reduction of military autonomy contributed to the decline of the Russian Ministry of Defence’s organisational evolution and increased the important of civilian expertise and skills in defence affairs.

Radical reform in the 2007-2012 period

The 2007-2012 reform implemented radical structural changes that made future investment in military equipment more fruitful. It was driven by the deteriorating condition of the armed forces, lessons learned from the conflicts in Chechnya and Georgia, and previous unsuccessful attempts at reform since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The reform generated unprecedented opposition from the officer corps. Service members resigned en masse, and some retired officers even dared to criticise the defence minister and the president.

In late 2007, for example, defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov and President Dmitri Medvedev decided to move the headquarters of the Russian Navy from Moscow to St Petersburg. The move was actively opposed by former chief of the general staff Yuri Baluyevsky (2004-2007) and many naval officers. In early 2008, a group of former navy chiefs, their deputies, and fleet commanders wrote a letter to Putin opposing the move. They argued that the move would cost at least 40-50 billion roubles (circa $1.5 billion), deprive the fleet of funds to build ships, and destroy the command system, including the strategic nuclear forces of the fleet. In April 2008, navy chief of staff Vladimir Vysotsky said the move had been postponed indefinitely. The “indefinite” period lasted until April 2011, when the move to St Petersburg began. But the civilian leadership wasted three years trying to overcome military opposition.

The reform included a mix of important achievements and shortcomings that has had lasting effects on Russia’s military effectiveness, including in Ukraine. The decision to downsize the military from a Soviet-style mobilisation-based model to a leaner, more agile and permanently ready force was aimed at enhancing the operational effectiveness of the armed forces and making them more responsive to the fast-paced nature of modern warfare. In addition, by strengthening the role of the general staff in operational and strategic planning while at the same time reorienting service headquarters towards force development and peacekeeping roles, the reform aimed to create a more efficient command and control system. The reorganisation of military districts into joint commands further supported an integrated approach to military command across the services.

However, the ambitious reform of the military HEI, designed to modernise curriculums and align officer training with modern combat requirements stalled. The next defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, ultimately partially rolled back some of the changes. The HEI failed to adopt an evidence-based methodology for assessing the effectiveness of training. Serdyukov’s attempt to bring more civilians in the military HEI also failed as former military faculty members simply resigned and re-applied as civilians. Moreover, social and welfare reforms fell short of fully fulfilling housing promises and eradicating the systemic problem of toxic military culture, abuse, and hazing.

The Russian Ministry of Defence failed to implement some changes because of the opposition inside the military and other security agencies that ultimately led to Serdyukov’s resignation. Yet Serdyukov’s commitment to making changes in the military and the strong administrative power of the minister of defence in Russian civil-military relations did enable a partial success of the reforms. The minister was still the main decision-maker in the military and Serdyukov appointed an obedient but administratively savvy chief of the general staff general, Nikolay Makarov, who willingly executed the Russian Ministry of Defence’s decisions. However, Serdyukov’s coalition of reformers was too small and consisted only of very high-level officers and ideological supporters of the minister in the public council that made his position weaker as the mistakes with the military reform accumulated.

The façade of reform under Shoigu

Serdyukov’s successor, Sergei Shoigu, took over in 2012 and changed the style of the civilian relationships with the military. That change included the allocation of significant responsibilities to the new chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov, while the Ministry of Defence focused on managing large financial investments and improving oversight mechanisms. Gerasimov’s task was to work towards achieving reform objectives within the military as he saw fit.

Still, Shoigu represented the armed forces in the broader government structure, lobbied for the necessary decisions and resources, and enhanced his oversight mechanisms. The realities of better pay for the troops and a successful operation in Syria provided convincing arguments that conditions had indeed improved in the military.

During Shoigu’s tenure, the Russian Ministry of Defence’s investments efforts included programs to improve command and control mechanisms, spur rearmament and advance military science. Shoigu created the National Defence Management Centre, under the leadership of army general Mikhail Misintsev, for the purpose of centralising operational command and streamlining decision-making processes within the armed forces. At the same time, major rearmament initiatives poured billions of roubles into procuring new equipment, particularly in the air force and the navy. In addition, Shoigu directed that military science efforts should focus on research and development in high-tech military equipment. General Oleg Ostapenko (the former space forces commander) became the first deputy minister for this sector. A year later he was replaced by Shoigu’s colleague General Ivan Popov from EMERCOM, the Russian emergency response ministry.

The current military doctrine, adopted in 2014, has redirected Russian military development towards greater centralisation of control over the military. As noted, it emphasises the need for the integration of information operations and strikes throughout the depth of the enemy’s territory, including in the aerospace and information domains and with the use of externally funded political forces and social movements.

To do that, the Russian Ministry of Defence opted for costly police control-style oversight of the military. As public reports on the manning of units and hiring of all-volunteer soldiers showed, the intrusive oversight failed to solve internal military problems. Despite growing salaries and better service conditions, the Russian military struggled to fill open positions and to increase the size of the all-volunteer force. The pace of changes has slowed down under Shoigu. And, years after Shoigu became minister of defence, the Russian Ministry of Defence still has not improved military discipline and eradicated hazing and abuse.

For example, private Ramil Shamsutdinov shot and killed eight fellow soldiers in 2019 because, he alleged, they had hazed him and threatened him with sexual violence. The crime sparked outrage in Russia, but the military and members of the Russian parliament were quick to blameprivate citizens and even video games for the shooting. The armed forces have not publicly discussed the systemic causes of the crime, and the story has gradually faded away.

The authorities tend to blame such crimes, as well as poor performance in exercises and other incidents on the failure of an individual soldier, rather than a problem worthy of systemic review. Commanders tend to quickly find a scapegoat, who may or may not be objectively responsible for the incident and close the case.

The unreformed and outdated military education and training system is ill-equipped to (re-)educate young Russian conscripts and improve their command skills and behaviour. The brightest and the fittest young Russians do not tend to join the military. The richer sections of society from Russia’s largest cities could avoid service with the military, while the poorer social classes had to serve and were usually more dependent on defence-related procurement and industries. However, the official response of the armed forces has always been to scapegoat civilian officials for failing to raise and educate patriotic young Russians who would then willingly join the military.The Russian military has struggled to adapt itself to the nation it supposedly serves by moving away from the conservative, overly centralised organisational culture inherited from the USSR.

Old versus New

The Russian military has for years been locked in this competition between a more horizontal and networked approach to military development and the conservative tradition of centralised control and the use of mass force. Part of the problem stems from the organisational concept of the Russian military which has as its cornerstone obedience to the commanding officer and his orders. Russian officers have the unilateral power to determine the future of their subordinates, from the general staff down to the platoon level of command. They are the ultimate decision-makers on promotions, bonuses, days off, and duties.

On the one hand, this tradition ensures strict adherence to orders, leaving little room for subordinates to appeal. On the other hand, the Russian military fosters toxic obedience, where the commander is always right. It encourages superficial compliance and flattering behaviour, undermines thoughtful leadership, unit cohesion and ultimately the quality of command. It creates a snowball effect in the assessment of capabilities in which soldiers, from first sergeants all the way up to senior generals, will only provide positive reports to superiors rather than real, objective, and sometimes critical information. The culture of personalised obedience ultimately also inhibits organisational learning and institutional development in the Russian military.

Excessive obedience also undermines the ability of civilians to control Russian soldiers’ behaviour on the battlefield. Since the war in Chechnya, there have been numerous reports of indiscriminate bombing, artillery attacks and human rights abuses in the areas of Russian military operations. Every military commits human rights abuses at times, but the military in Russia has never been seriously reprimanded for its behaviour. The rule of law means little in Russian public affairs, but it has been particularly weak in holding military personnel accountable for their crimes, including against civilians and their own comrades. The Russian military still has considerable capacity to protect its own from being held accountable for crimes and abuses.

Russia and its military state

Most of the problems exposed by the Russian military in Ukraine are not new. They have been visible and discussed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the Russian state has made little progress in solving them. Russia frequently demonstrated poor integration of its operational plan and combat tactics with loosely defined strategic objectives, failed to properly train and prepare its troops for war, and suffered serious procurement difficulties. These problems were widely recognised and discussed by Russian military theorists in the Russian Ministry of Defence official magazines.

One of the main reasons for Russia’s slow military development is civil-military relations. On the one hand, Russian politicians have found it difficult to get the military to do what they want. Despite the growing power of the regime, Putin has been unable to overcome the military’s objections to the reforms he has initiated over the past 22 years. For the first eight years, the Russian military enjoyed substantial military autonomy and disagreed on the priority and sequencing of changes. A brief period of intrusive and forceful imposition of orders in 2008-2012 brought much resistance, criticism, and avoidable mistakes that ultimately removed an unpopular defence minister from office.

Developments since 2012 appear to have improved the balance of power between civilians and the military. However, the lack of functional monitoring and evaluation mechanisms (as opposed to intrusive oversight), the lack of civilian expertise in defence sector development, coupled with the lack of investment in military education and training, and the early successes in eastern Ukraine and Syria, blinded Russian military reform.

The appointment of the new minister of defence will not make this task easier. To implement the necessary changes, Belousov will have to build his own team by appointing new deputy minsters of defence. The positions of first deputy for financial and economic work, state secretary for government relations, and deputies for the logistical support, will be crucial for streamlining his work and ultimately delivering the results. These officials will be spearheading the management of the military’s gigantic financial flows and adapting the Russian legal system to the military’s needs. They will also have to establish positive working relationships with the general staff and military-industrial representatives who may lack either the skills or willingness to reform the system.

As an outsider to the military world, Belousov is likely to rely on the chief of the general staff to enforce his reform aspirations among the military. It is difficult to find a suitable candidate for this position as this general should be highly experienced in managing (in headquarters) and commanding (in the field) the military and possess little political ambition. The current chief, Valery Gerasimov, has already spent more than a decade serving as the chief of the general staff, which is a record in Russia’s post-Soviet history. He may not be up to the scale and quality of the tasks that Belousov will have to undertake. To curtail military autonomy, Belousov may need a younger and obedient chief with war experience.

The level of military autonomy determines how loyal the military is in implementing civilian decisions. Too much military autonomy creates the need for a very capable and professional civilian leadership, otherwise autonomy may produce a disloyal military that threatens the reform efforts and can potentially endanger the entire state.

The quest for loyalty in Russia has a cascading effect. If the Kremlin wants a loyal minister and chief of the general staff that would limit the military autonomy, they will seek to surround themselves with loyal senior military officers and Russian Ministry of Defence officials. That high command then prefers reliable subordinates who will always carry out its decisions, who then logically look for similarly obedient more junior officers and officials. In the end, the natural desire to surround oneself with trustworthy supporters contributes to the vicious circle of finger-pointing and false reporting as everything depends on the decision of the ultimate commander.

On the other hand, a completely autonomous force under weak civilian leadership can potentially threaten the state, as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny demonstrated. Prigozhin’s private military company, Wagner, developed informally and outside the official defence sector and its regulations. It became a highly autonomous paramilitary group whose leadership challenged the Russian state. Clearly, the correct balance of military autonomy is crucial for ensuring a loyal but functioning military.

The war with Ukraine has naturally produced thousands of highly experienced soldiers and commanders in the Russian military. This means that the Kremlin now has a large pool of qualified military personnel who can potentially significantly improve the Russian military. The level of expertise in the Russian high command and Russian Ministry of Defence leadership will determine whether the next reform addresses the key components of military effectiveness. However, improving the education and training system in the Russian military will require decisive institutional changes, a radical overhaul of the personnel system, and decades of stable military development to improve Russian military culture. Even if the veterans of the war in Ukraine can replace some commanders at several levels, institutional changes without a chance of civilian leadership would be a challenge for Russia.

Even experienced military commanders need reliable information about adversaries and new military developments, as well as evidence of their own troops’ readiness. The quality of monitoring and evaluation determines how well the Russian Ministry of Defence can identify problems, monitor implementation, and evaluate the results of reforms. The proliferation of information about the Russian military partially solves this problem, but the outcome of the war with Ukraine will determine whether this evidence will be about a defeated or victorious military.

A Russian defeat in Ukraine without regime change in Moscow would make radical reform more likely, while a success would more probably postpone significant changes in the military again. Regardless, Russia will require strong and effective civilian leadership that can tolerate but also control military autonomy to find balance in civil-military relations and improve its military effectiveness. Will Putin’s new term bring this?

Russia has never had that type of civilian leadership in the post-Soviet period. Paraphrasing a Russian idiom, Russian leaders speak with Suvorov’s flair, but their actions rarely match his daring.

• About the Author: Kirill Shamiev is a visiting fellow with the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He focuses on Russia’s civil-military relations and domestic politics and policymaking. Shamiev left Russia in 2017 and completed his MA and PhD at the Central European University. He currently also works as a senior research consultant with European Commission tenders related to public administration and security topics.
• Source: This article was published by ECFR
• Acknowledgments: The author would like to acknowledge the support of the ECFR Wider Europe programme, Jeremy Shapiro, the editors, and Nastassia Zenovich for their invaluable help in preparing the report. The author is grateful to the participants (in chronological order) of the BASEES conference (Cambridge, United Kingdom), the PONARS online conference, the Biennial Conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (Reston, Virginia), and the guests and hosts of the many seminars and workshops in Europe and the United States.
• Methodology: The report relies on interviews, memoirs, laws, and public speeches of military and civilian elites. In three waves of interviews in 2018-2021, the author spoke to 36 former politicians, officers, and officials, as well as civil society activists. The majority of interviewees were born in the 1960-70s, while most civilians represented the 1970-80s generation. Some civil society members interviewed were involved in the political process during the 2000-2012 period. However, the interviews themselves have limited explanatory power for current events because the interviewees were expressing their views on events that happened in the past. Therefore, the author used memoirs, media articles, and laws to supplement the interview data.

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[1] Author’s translation

[2] Author’s translation

[3] Author’s interviews with civilian and military officials involved in defence policymaking in 2018-2021, Moscow, Russia

[4] Author’s translation

[5] Author’s translation

By Nicola Williams

Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop takes on a challenging role as the recently appointed UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Myanmar. To avoid joining the high-level graveyard of UN envoys, diplomats and ASEAN leaders who have tried and failed to negotiate with the junta, she must remember the lessons learnt from over a decade of international peacebuilding and failed mediation efforts.  

Bishop should avoid advocating for high-level track-one negotiations to solve Myanmar’s civil war. There is no bargaining range for talks between the junta and the broad resistance, as both sides seek decisive military outcomes and have entirely different visions for the country. Considering Myanmar’s experience with multi-stakeholder peace negotiations with the junta involved, this approach is unviable, even in more ‘ripe’ times for bargains. Track-one negotiations are generally only feasible at the tail end of many track-two peace processes across multiple years and different issues or, potentially, for a victor’s peace when the military is significantly weakened.

Focussing on the subnational conflicts within Myanmar’s national conflict and ethnic relationships within the broad federal democracy movement embedded within the resistance will be more effective. This could involve looking at contests over territory and identities in the hotly contested Shan State and workshopping what the federalism puzzle could look like in one of Myanmar’s most complex ethnic landscapes. The approach may also tackle challenges among political stakeholders with legitimacy claims and ‘turf’ contests. In any strategy, it is wise to go bottom-up rather than top-down.  

Another lesson Bishop should keep in mind is the importance of sequencing initial meetings to build trust and multiple stakeholder engagement strategies. Learning from recent efforts by ASEAN leaders, it is crucial that the UN Special Envoy does not rush to meet the junta in Myanmar. First, she should meet with leading Myanmar and regional stakeholders outside the country. This includes the exiled National Unity Government, Myanmar civil society and political leaders, ASEAN leaders, Western counterparts, the Chinese and Japanese Special Envoys and refugees. There is also a suggestion to avoid pictures with all parties to the conflict, but particularly the junta, to prevent  being used in propaganda campaigns. Setting up flexible back channels will also be key for managing relationships and the risks of disinformation around the UN Special Envoy’s office.

Bishop should also work behind the scenes to improve Myanmar’s humanitarian response system, including through local non-government aid delivery. The conflict is not ending anytime soon and may only worsen as strategic sites are fought over, as was the case with the Myawaddy border town capture and recapture in April 2024. Addressing the bureaucratic challenges and politics surrounding the UN’s humanitarian role requires decisive senior leadership and new approaches to reaching conflict-affected communities through local aid providers, including elements of the resistance and ethnic armed groups that provide services where the government no longer holds territory.

The UN’s new envoy should work in concert with ASEAN while pursuing a separate approach that goes beyond standing on the sidelines to offer mediation to the junta. It is also vital that the UN Special Envoy provides something different to China’s illiberal peace efforts, which narrowly targets stability along the China–Myanmar border through opaque ceasefires with limited peace dividends. Convincing ASEAN and Chinese partners that Myanmar’s junta offers no path towards stability is critical for building better region-wide strategies that involve the federal democracy movement and move beyond crisis mitigation.

The Special Envoy must not blow any oxygen into the junta’s pretence that the previous peace process between Myanmar’s centre and its ethnic armed organisations (known as EAOs) is still progressing. This process is dead. Even before the 2021 military coup, it spent years on life support. Nothing could be more symbolic of the death of a peace process than the military ousting one of the parties to the peace negotiations — the democratically-elected government — and then jailing, exiling or executing elected officials. There is simply no junta-led peace process to continue building on and assuming otherwise is a strategic pitfall and will likely lead to political backlash. 

Bishop should not push all conflict parties toward a multilateral ceasefire agreement as a pathway to initiate dialogue. This approach has not worked given the recent failed attempts at a nationwide ceasefire and scores of broken bilateral ceasefires. It is important to get a handle on Myanmar’s long history of ceasefires and how the junta has historically used and abused these instruments. Beyond temporary subnational pauses negotiated since the 2021 coup, discussing a substantive ceasefire instrument among conflict parties is likely best placed if and when the military is significantly weakened and once there is political agreement for a transition.

Finally, the new Special Envoy should ambitiously and cautiously carve out a new role as a third-party actor in Myanmar’s civil war, distinct from regional leaders and even former UN Special Envoys on Myanmar. Powerholders within the federal democracy movement and the military have previously struggled to effectively use external support, managing their issues with limited and cherry-picked interventions. But the war and multiple crises since the coup, including the Rohingya genocide, have spilled into the region and are far beyond internal management.

A new approach is needed that learns from years of failed peacebuilding and mediation interventions and works diligently in the interests of the Myanmar people, the significant majority of whom crave a bright future without brutal military rule.

• About the author: Nicola S Williams is PhD Candidate at the Crawford School of Public Policy and Board Member at the Myanmar Research Centre, The Australian National University. Nicola is an international development professional with experience in conflict resolution and governance. 
• Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum

(RFE/RL) — Even as Iran declared a period of mourning following the deaths of President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and others in a helicopter crash, the country moved forward and set June 28 as the date for an election to determine Raisi’s successor.

Iranian authorities also said the funeral procession for Raisi will be held in Tehran on May 22.

The announcements came as Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared five days of mourning after the bodies of Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian were found at the site of a helicopter crash in northwest Iran.

Meanwhile, Washington said for the first time that Tehran had asked for U.S. help in the helicopter incident but that it was unable to provide assistance, mainly due to logistical reasons.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller did not specify how the request was made or the nature of it. The United States and Iran do not have diplomatic relations.

Iranian state television on May 20 said the helicopter had crashed due to poor weather conditions. It was unclear how many people were on board the helicopter when it went down.

Khamenei also named First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber as interim president. Iranian law stipulates that if the president dies, power is transferred to the first vice president.

A council consisting of the speaker of parliament, the head of the judiciary, and the first vice president must arrange for a new president to be elected within 50 days.

Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Baqeri Kani was appointed acting foreign minister, Iranian state media reported.

Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency said the governor of East Azerbaijan Province and other unspecified officials and bodyguards were aboard the ill-fated aircraft.

Foreign governments on May 20 issued expressions of condolence and solidarity. Lebanon announced three days of mourning to honor Raisi. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian were both “true, reliable friends of our country.”

Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, issued a statement of condolence and thanked Raisi for his “tireless efforts in solidarity” with the Palestinian people.

The United States, a bitter rival of Iran – and which had imposed financial sanctions on Raisi when he was head of Iran’s judiciary in 2019 – also offered its condolences.

“The United States expresses its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran,” the State Department said in a statement.

“As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The White House, meanwhile, had harsh words for Raisi, saying he had “blood on his hands” for supporting extremist groups in the Middle East.

U.S. national-security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that “no question, this was a man who had a lot of blood on his hands.”

European Council President Charles Michel issued a statement of “sincere condolences,” adding “our thoughts go to the families.”

Search-and-rescue teams, aided by several foreign governments, had been frantically searching for the helicopter after it went down in bad weather conditions in a mountainous area of the country late on May 19.

Some activists criticized the EU for assisting in the rescue operation of a leader who has been accused of overseeing major human rights abuses.

But EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic defended the move on May 20, saying that by providing satellite mapping services to Tehran, Brussels was acting “upon request for facilitating a search and rescue operation” and was not “an act of political support to any regime or establishment.”

“It is simply an expression of the most basic humanity,” he added in a post on X.

Raisi’s helicopter was on its way to the city of Tabriz when it went down near the city of Jolfa in what state television said was a “hard landing,” but several news reports quoted government sources as saying the helicopter crashed as it crossed a mountainous and forested area.

The bodies from the helicopter that crashed were severely burned, but not beyond recognition, according to the head of Iran’s Crisis Management Organization, Mohammad Hassan Nami. He said DNA tests were not needed to confirm the identities of those killed in the crash.

He added that Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Al-e Hashem, who served as Khamenei’s representative in East Azerbaijan Province, survived the crash initially and remained alive for about an hour before he died.

Nami said that, during that time, Al-e Hashem had made contact with Raisi’s chief of staff by phone. He did not reveal any further details.

The Iranian government said the helicopter was one of three flying in a convoy, and the other two reportedly landed safely in Tabriz.

The ultraconservative Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian had been in Azerbaijan earlier on May 19 to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who said on X that Azerbaijan was “profoundly troubled” by the news that Raisi’s helicopter had gone down.

Raisi was elected president in 2021 and has since tightened many restrictions on Iranians through enforcement of morality laws and a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests spurred by the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody for allegedly violating the code on head scarves.

He has also pushed hard in nuclear talks with world powers while also allowing the country to markedly increase its uranium enrichment program.

This is part two of a two-part series that explores developments autocratic Arab rulers and US policymakers ignore at their peril. This two-part series explores developments autocratic Arab rulers and US policymakers ignore at their peril. This two-part series explores developments autocratic Arab rulers and US policymakers ignore at their peril. The series is based on an essay published in Horizons. Part 1 looked at the region as a whole as well as Hamas’ standing in Gaza eight months into the war. Part 2 focuses on the war’s potential fallout in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

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US President Joe Biden doesn’t fit the mould of a high-risk gambler.

Yet, gambling is the crux of his velvet glove dealings with Israel. With one eye on Israeli politics and the other on presidential elections in the United States in six months, Mr. Biden is walking a tightrope.

It goes without saying that the Palestinian issue touches many across the Greater Middle East.

Israel and the world’s inability or unwillingness to help Palestinians secure their rights and Palestinians’ sense of not being accorded the dignity and respect accorded to others mirrors a quest for recognition and dignity across the region.

Take Syria.

Returning this year to her home country for the first time in more than a decade, BBC journalist Lina Sinjab noted that Syria “is sinking into poverty, and many ordinary people are desperate. ‘There is no light at the end of the tunnel,’ they say. It has become normal to see families sleeping in the street and others digging food out of rubbish bins, while in other areas, a high-class lifestyle reminiscent of the swankiest parts of London or Paris continues unchanged.”

Grinding poverty keeps thousands of children out of school and forced to work in northwestern Syria. Across Syria, more than 43 per cent of children do not go to school, raising the spectre of a generation left behind.

Eleven-year-old Ahmad Amro and his family of ten fled the city of Aleppo in 2016. Since then, their home has been a tent in Syria’s northwestern Idlib countryside, a region with an 88.74 per cent unemployment rate ravaged by war and a 2023 earthquake.

Ahmad dreams of “wearing school clothes to go to school.” Instead, he and his older brother, Abdo, who has never attended school, struggle to make ends meet by helping their father sell daffodils.

With children like Ahmad and Abdo across the Greater Middle East staring at a bottomless abyss of despair and hopelessness, the question is not if but when and how simmering frustration and anger will boil over.

“The Gaza war is stirring up every radical movement across the Middle East. Its recruitment potential against the US and Israel is enormous & will have repercussions for decades,” tweeted Middle East scholar Joshua Landis.

Mr. Landis noted that Osama Bin Laden first conceived of the 11 September 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in 1982 when he watched US-built F-16 fighter jets carpet bomb Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

For now, much of the threat of renewed revolts and militancy may be more bluster than real.

Iranian-backed Iraqi militants asserted in April that they stood ready to arm 12,000 fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Jordan that would open a new front against Israel.

Abu Ali al-Askari, a Kataib Hezbollah security official, suggested Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s assessment that all Jordanian militants needed was access to weapons inspired the offer.

There is no evidence of an Islamic fighting force in tightly controlled Jordan despite mounting

public anger at the Gaza war, a limited number of border incidents, and indications of attempts by Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, Hamas, and Iran to exploit the fury, and in some cases smuggle arms from Jordan into the West Bank.

Against the backdrop of 22 per cent unemployment, Jordan’s Brotherhood affiliate, the Islamic Action Front, hopes escalating pro-Hamas protests in Jordan will favour it in general elections scheduled for later this year.

Earlier, Kataib Hezbollah said it would work with partners in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to enable militants to strike at “any point in West Asia where the Americans exist.”

A close US ally dependent on American economic and financial aid with a peace treaty with Israel, Jordan walks a tightrope with more than half of its population of Palestinian descent. Jordanian participation in the shooting down in April of a barrage of Iranian drones and missiles fired by Iran at Israel has increased the tightrope’s tension.

Similarly, Hamas leaders have sought to capitalise on pro-Palestinian sentiment and Jordan’s vulnerability.

“We call on our brothers in Jordan, in particular, to escalate all forms of popular, mass, and resistance action. You, our people in Jordan, are the nightmare of the occupation that fears your movement and strives tirelessly to neutralize and isolate you from your cause.,” said Hamas military spokesman Abu Obeida.

Senior Doha-based Hamas official Khaled Mishaal, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Amman in 1997, told a women’s gathering in Jordan in a video address that “Jordan is a beloved country, and it is the closest to Palestine, so its men and women are expected to take more supportive roles than any other people towards the land of resistance and resilience.”

While Jordan is unlikely to emerge as a significant venue for militant resistance against Israel, escalating Baloch and Islamic State violence in Iran, a country in which widespread discontent regularly spills into the streets, and the adjacent Pakistani province of Balochistan is an indication of potential explosions of popular discontent and/or militancy.

Wealthy Gulf states see the writing on the wall. They worry that simmering public frustration and anger in much of the Middle East threaten regional stability, and, with it their economic diversification and development plans.

“Islamist groups want to benefit from (the ongoing protests in Jordan) …and reproduce the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions again,” warned Saudi journalist Hassan al-Mustafa. “Volatility in Jordan would pose a direct threat to Saudi Arabia’s own national security,” said Abdulaziz Sager, head of the Gulf Research Council and a scholar with close ties to the Saudi government.

Signalling Gulf concerns, Salah Al Budair, the Medina Grand Mosque’s imam, asked God in a Ramadan prayer to protect Muslim countries “from revolutions and protest.”

Wealthy Gulf states may be better positioned to pacify their populations but are not immune to the region’s undercurrents.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has sought to bolster Saudi national identity to cushion the impact of rapid social change that has sparked concern among some conservatives and those who fear they may be left behind.

“Whilst there is widespread support for the Vision, there are concerns about the pace of change, as well as the perception that to date, there has been an over-emphasis on elite interests,” said Mark C. Thompson, a Saudi-based social scientist and recent convert to Islam, who has long tracked the evolution of Saudi youth attitudes towards Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 economic diversification and development plan.

Mr. Thompson noted that “the significance of Saudi Arabia’s two primary identity narratives, namely, Islam and family, have only changed incrementally regardless of post-2030 transformations… The danger is that Vision-related transformations might be weak in the face of much stronger traditional values, and, consequently, the rapid social changes could vanish just as quickly precisely because they have not become deep-rooted within Saudi communities.”

The social scientist cautioned that most foreign Saudi watchers based their analysis and conclusions on interactions with members of the Saudi elite who would have the most to lose if social change were to falter.

Mr. Thompson quoted a Western-educated Saudi consultant saying that most Saudis “would not be affected greatly” if the entertainment sector failed.

The fact that Saudi elites are the greatest beneficiaries of Mr. Bin Salman’s reforms means that most Saudis, concerned primarily about jobs, cost of living, affordable housing, and healthcare, often only benefit at best partially. To benefit more fully, they would have to have what the elite has: wasta or clout and connections.

The risk for Mr. Bin Salman is that the reforms widen the kingdom’s already yawning income gap, cast further doubt on the integrity of the crown prince’s anti-corruption campaign, and undermine widespread support for his vision.

In addition, small and medium-sized enterprises and their employees feel they are often excluded from participation in Vision-related projects favouring large and well-known family enterprises. As a result, young Saudis with lesser family backgrounds and education become drivers rather than executives when they migrate from the provinces to the cities.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may be one-man-ruled autocracies, yet their leaders are sensitive to public opinion to varying degrees. “I know that the Saudi government under MbS (Mohammed bin Salman) has put in a lot of effort to actually do its own public opinion polls… They pay attention to it… They are very well aware of which way the winds are blowing on the street. They take that pretty much to heart on what to do and what not to do… On some issues, they are going to make a kind of executive decision… On this one, we’re going to ignore it; on the other one, we’re going to…try to curry favour with the public in some unexpected way,” said the late David Pollock, a Middle East scholar who until recently oversaw the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s polling in the region.

The problem for rulers like Messrs. Bin Salman and Bin Zayed is that their rule’s moorings could be called into question by a failure to deliver public goods and services that offer economic prospects. At the same time, social reforms needed to bolster development go hand in hand with undermining the authority of religious establishments. Increased autocracy that turns clerics and scholars into regime parrots has fuelled youth scepticism toward political elites and religious institutions.

For rulers like the Saudi crown prince, the loosening of social restrictions – including the disempowerment of the kingdom’s religious police, the lifting of a ban on women’s driving, less strict implementation of gender segregation, the introduction of Western-style entertainment, and greater professional opportunities for women, and, in the UAE a degree of genuine religious pluralism – are only the first steps in responding to youth aspirations.

Determined to contain public sentiment, Saudi authorities, in contrast to the UAE and Qatar and despite official condemnations of Israel’s Gaza war conduct, have cracked down on expressions of solidarity such as the donning of keffiyehs, the chequered head scarf symbolizing Palestinian identity, T-shirts with Palestine emblazoned on them, and the waving of Palestinian flags.

In the same vein, Egypt, a nation that perennially pulls back from the brink of economic disaster with the help of band-aid foreign financial injections, has largely banned public protests and criticism of the country’s ties with Israel.

Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi fears that pro-Palestinian demonstrations could expand into domestic protest as has happened in the past.

The ban was imposed after pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, an icon of the 2011 popular Arab revolts that toppled four leaders, including Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, reverted to chanting the uprisings’ common slogan, ‘Bread, freedom, social justice!’

“The Palestinian cause has always been a politicizing factor for Egyptian youth across generations,” noted Hossam el-Hamalawy, a prominent Egyptian journalist, photographer, activist, and author of a weekly newsletter.

“In fact, for many Egyptian political activists — whether those who led the (2011) revolution or were involved in earlier protests — their gateway into politics was the Palestinian cause. The 2011 uprising in Egypt was literally the climax of a process that started with the second Palestinian intifada a decade earlier… The more this war (in Gaza) drags on, the more likely it is that something might happen,” Mr. El-Hamalawy added.

An end to the war may lower the temperature and take the immediate sting out of public anger, but the drivers of discontent, including the quest for dignity, remain unaltered.

Even worse, the fault lines have hardened. The Middle East and North Africa are populated by the harshest rulers the region has witnessed since its various constituents became independent. Repression in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates is at an all-time high. The Gulf states go to great lengths to ensure that others in the region mirror their suppression of any form of dissent.

Despite a worldwide clamour for a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state, hardened Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinians mirror Arab crackdowns on dissent.

Israel has moved from de facto recognition of Palestinian rights to outright denial but was for decades willing to go through the motions of a peace process.

Storied former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan was brutally honest when he spoke in 1956 at the funeral of an Israeli farmer, brutally murdered by Palestinian militants.

“Let us not cast blame on the murderers. For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes, we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate,” Dayan said.

“Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs living around us. This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong, and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down,” Dayan added.

Dayan’s comments frame United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez’s statement seven decades later that Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel did not happen “in a vacuum,” particularly with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967.

They also frame the disregard for the lives of others and their own that have been put on public display in Hamas’ targeting of civilians and brutality on October 7 and its risking of the lives of innocent Palestinian civilians during the war as well as Israel’s relentless devastation of Gaza at enormous human cost and its failure to prioritise the release of hostages held by Hamas.

Said an Arab human rights activist: “Gaza is the pinnacle of the Middle East’s disdain for life and the dignity of individuals. It’s disregard on a massive and unprecedented scale. It’s disregard that underwrites autocracy in the region. It’s disregard that ultimately will spark an explosion, even if it’s impossible to predict when, where, and how.”