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Russia's soldiers are looting Ukrainian citizens - because Putin's military apparatus is failing

2022-08-08T11:07:55.384Z


Russia's soldiers are looting Ukrainian citizens - because Putin's military apparatus is failing Created: 08/08/2022 13:01 From: Foreign Policy The screenshot of a YouTube video shows Russian soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war sending their captured goods. © Anton Motolko/Youtube The Ukraine war shows how badly organized the Russian army is. The causes of the problems in the military lie far i


Russia's soldiers are looting Ukrainian citizens - because Putin's military apparatus is failing

Created: 08/08/2022 13:01

From: Foreign Policy

The screenshot of a YouTube video shows Russian soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war sending their captured goods.

© Anton Motolko/Youtube

The Ukraine war shows how badly organized the Russian army is.

The causes of the problems in the military lie far in the past.

  • Russian soldiers stealing chickens, begging for food and stealing petrol: It's observations like these that show how poorly positioned the army is.

  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has big ideological ambitions for a war of conquest, but the goal of individual members of his army is profit.

  • This article, written by military historian

    Lucian Staiano-Daniels,

    is available in German for the first time – it was first published in

    Foreign Policy

    magazine on May 18, 2022 .

BERLIN – On the phone, Russian soldiers bragged about things they could loot from the temporarily squatted Ukrainian homes: one drank cognac, another stole machine tools for his own projects, and another got fur coats for his wife and daughter.

One woman responded delightedly, but also a little worried: "Can you do that?" She doesn't ask out of concern for the Ukrainians, but out of fear of her husband's superiors.

The soldier reassured her: his officers didn't care because "they also get things there".

This phone call was published in a single, one-page source in April 2022: Ukraine's official Twitter account.

However, many sources confirm that the armed forces of the Russian Federation are looting on a massive scale.

The movement profile of the spoils of war such as AirPods, cell phones and laptops is visible across continents through GPS tracking.

Russia-Ukraine War: Fuel, food, equipment – ​​supplies are stagnating everywhere

The looting takes place at all levels of the hierarchy, from simple soldiers like these men to their officers.

On March 12, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Service reported that the Russian army has legalized looting: "

Due to significant logistical problems and congested lines of communication, it is unable to properly supply its units with fuel, food, equipment, ammunition and rotation." The Russian army allowed what had been happening for weeks when it ordered its troops to live off the land and "proceed to 'self-sufficiency' until further orders."

But that's not because "Russians look European but aren't European," as one MEP explained.

The causes lie in the nature of the Russian state and the material conditions of the Russian army, not in the Russians themselves.

$31 a month: Russian conscripts are poorly paid

The Russian army is extremely poorly equipped.

From the very beginning of the Ukraine conflict, men were feeding and transporting themselves by stealing things.

A photo posted to Twitter on February 27, three days after the invasion began, showed an advancing Russian convoy made up of stolen civilian vehicles.

On March 9, a Ukrainian Twitter account posted video of Russian soldiers stealing chickens.

At the beginning of the war, soldiers were filmed begging for food and stealing petrol.

Conscript soldiers of the Donetsk People's Republic were tied up with tape and slept behind tarpaulins and structures that looked like logs.

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The motives for the thefts include poor pay and a lack of supplies.

Many soldiers come from the poorest and most remote regions of Russia.

For them, the loot is a valuable additional source of income: Russian conscripts receive the equivalent of $31 a month.

Before the war, contract soldiers received 62,000 rubles a month, which was about $961 a month at the pre-war exchange rate.

When these men die, their wives receive 10,000 rubles, the equivalent of about $153.

Ukraine war requires a completely different approach than in Syria

In view of the shockingly poor Russian logistics, the Russian troops were also cut off from their own supplies.

Possibly the Russian army was thinking of previous operations like in Syria and preparing for brutal but logistically less complex attacks on major cities.

These attacks failed without there being a plan B.

The Russian army now faces challenges such as moving supply convoys through enemy territory, poor communications, and dispersed to possibly non-existent command leadership.

But these problems aren't just the result of a failed bet on a quick win.

We are dealing with a set of attitudes and practices that are deeper and broader and are causing these problems.

For example, Russian military vehicles are stranded not only because they have not been adequately maintained during their lifetime and many of their parts are counterfeit or missing, but because they have been stolen.

Russia's ill-equipped army: problematic interdependence between the state and the private sector

This is the result of years of failure.

This desolate supply situation is reflected in retrospect in earlier pre-war sources in which the soldiers complained that they were not provided with basic materials such as uniforms and boots.

The Russian army is poorly equipped and poorly paid because the public and private are intertwined in the Russian military apparatus.

This has a long tradition in warfare: in 17th-century Europe it was common for "military contractors" to sell their services to heads of state, since the nascent state could not yet take over warfare itself.

In modern Russia, the opposite is true.

It's not that state capacities aren't sufficient to wage war.

The Russian state has degraded into a country no longer able to undertake the military efforts it once did.

Private individuals benefit from a state that can no longer fulfill basic tasks.

war for profit

In both early modern Europe and modern Russia, the weakness of the state apparatus and the unpredictability of private individuals led to phenomena such as officers confiscating their own men's provisions in order to then sell them on.

At the time, however, corruption was well known.

It was expected and planned by the heads of state.

In this war, their disastrous effects were not foreseen by Western analysts - and perhaps not even recognized by those in power in Russia.

These analysts were shocked by the most fundamental problem facing early modern officers: the gap between power on paper and real power in a society

State interest and personal interest sometimes coincide.

Thus, the goal of many, but not all, military contractors in the early modern period was to gain fame and money for themselves or to climb the social ladder in the service of their masters and paymasters.

Like the sale of offices, this relationship could be mutually beneficial: the head of state got an officer, and the officer was ennobled.

But when the two are in conflict, the effects are catastrophic.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has big ideological ambitions for a war of conquest, but the goal of individual members of his army is profit.

This applies to all levels, from figures like Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who also runs the notorious Wagner mercenary group, to rank and file soldiers.

Profit can be secured through corrupt activities such as stealing one's own men's rations for resale.

It can also be secured on site by looting or compulsory levies.

Whether the Ukrainian tweet about the Russian phone calls was genuine or not, the fact that a soldier is said to have said that the officers don't care because "that's where they get stuff too" expresses what happened on the ground.

War officers appropriate the spoils of their men

The looting shows the extent to which there is a lack of coordination in the theater of war.

For example, the image of a wrecked Russian truck full of looted washing machines appeared on Twitter: Both the truck and sorting the loot into certain categories require coordination.

This also applies to the looting of military equipment and its shipment to Russia by express.

It is likely that the officers appropriate their men's loot and coordinate its sale, while receiving a share themselves.

Although many common soldiers, like their ancestors back in the 17th century, only need food, alcohol or things for their own use or that of their families, many see this war as an opportunity to acquire goods to resell.

A Ukrainian journalist observed markets in Belarus selling loot like “dishwashers, bicycles, carpets.”

There are numerous precedents for this in war.

When the city was sacked by imperial troops in 1631, Otto von Guericke, mayor of Magdeburg, left behind descriptions of the soldiers' markets that arose during and after the sack.

Except for the bicycles and the dishwashers, they could be identical to those of today.

No "classic front" favors atrocities

Ordinary looting, theft, requisitions, and clashes with civilians are examples of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called an "atrocious situation."

An "atrocious situation" is a situation designed in such a way that an average person, such as an 18-year-old Russian conscript - or you or me - "could commit atrocities on a regular basis."

Lifton cites factors such as feelings of vulnerability, the lack of distinction between combatants and civilians, tacit or explicit encouragement from superiors to achieve results, and anger and sadness at dead friends.

One factor he highlights is the presumed presence of "invisible" or covert attackers and the "desperate need

Some of these factors were common to all armies of the 16th and 17th centuries: since the armed forces, for example, could not control territory beyond their lines of communication, there was often no classic "front" behind which hostilities were not taking place.

Civilians routinely attacked soldiers, and there was no telling the difference between people who posed a threat and people who did not pose a threat.

All of these factors applied to the US Army in Vietnam and Iraq.

They also apply to the Russian army in Ukraine.

The difference is that in the Russian army, the ultimate atrocities are at best ignored and often officially commended.

Russia's Ukraine War: Small group cohesion fuels abuse, rape and looting

The 

Wall Street Journal

 reports that "hungry and undisciplined Russian troops are shooting at unarmed villagers, breaking into supermarkets and shops, and raiding homes in search of food and valuables as their own supply lines have collapsed." At the checkpoints, the soldiers demanded food and cigarettes.

When Russian troops occupied Trostianets in Ukraine, they cut off the city's water and electricity supplies.

As supplies ran out, the soldiers began entering homes and businesses in small groups.

The cohesiveness of small groups, which military theorists see as one of the reasons men fight, is also a framework that can encourage abuse, rape, pillage, or desertion.

In this case, the invisible enemies are Nazis, Banderists or Ukrainian nationalists, from whom the Russian army should rid Ukraine.

When Russian troops failed to find these Nazis in occupied Trostianets, they became paranoid, frustrated and angry.

Over time, they became more and more brutal - tanks shot at buildings indiscriminately.

In the Ukrainian city of Bucha, soldiers herded people into a 

dacha

, a Russian summer home, to be tortured.

These soldiers, too, appear to have been hopelessly naïve and received no support from their government.

Many did not know why they were there.

A soldier in the 

Wall Street Journal report

 was interviewed wanted to know if Ukrainians like them: Unexpectedly tough Ukrainian resistance may have been perceived by men like him as ingratitude or treason.

You may have thought that rape, murder, torture and looting were punishments.

Russian soldiers loot, destroy and rape as a result of a number of factors within the Russian military apparatus.

This points to the broad lines of governance and corruption in Russia itself.

The Russian army, which treats its soldiers with nothing but contempt, has created a hotbed of atrocities.

By Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Lucian Staiano-Daniels

 is a historian specializing in 17th-century military history and was most recently a Dan David Prize Fellow at Tel Aviv University.

He is currently working on a book on the historical social anthropology of enlisted men in the early 17th century.

His most recent academic article is titled, "Masters in the Things of War: Rethinking Military Justice during the Thirty Years War."

This article was first published in English in the magazine "ForeignPolicy.com" on May 18, 2022 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to the readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.

*Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.

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Source: merkur

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