Two things have come to mind since before Russia invaded Ukraine.

1) It would be an incredibly stupid move by Putin. As much as people were warning me that it was coming and officially the buildup was menacing enough to predict an invasion, I did not believe it would happen because it would be a disaster for Russia.

2) Paper Bear. Despite widespread worry about Russian forces having some residual capabilities, deep levels of corruption inherent to dictatorships meant their logistics and technology was sure to fail. Moreover, I didn’t see much evidence of adaptation or learning. The hard work and feedback needed for success are anathema to dictatorships; strong men are typically extremely weak when tested in conditions they can’t cheat.

Clearly I was wrong on the first count as invasion did happen. Being a terrible mistake for Putin wasn’t enough to deter him from invading.

On the second count I was more right, and I’ve had to resist temptation to say “told you so” especially on channels where Americans wildly overestimated Russian ability to execute on anything other than basic looting.

This has now been documented better by the NYT than I could have ever said it.

… shows the pitfalls of Putin’s top-down governance, in which officials and military officers have little leeway to make their own decisions and adapt to developments in real time.

Even though multiple U.S. officials have for multiple days said they expect Russia to adapt to its failures, I have seen the opposite. The culture is devoid of adaptation by design, in order to ensure fealty to Putin.

That same NYT article goes on to say that Putin’s messaging is now that it is an overabundance of concern for Ukrainian civilians to blame for slow progress, and also that it is going exactly to plan.

Clearly anyone with even the least ability to adapt to a situation and think independently would immediately recognize that as garbage propaganda.

And there’s the rub.

The Russian military death toll is unofficially headed over 10,000, nearing the same number of lives they lost over a decade in Chechnya.

It becomes increasingly difficult to cover that up, not to mention explain away a high death toll even among top Russian military leaders.

The deaths reflect operational security failures as well as the challenges of the Russian military’s top-heavy command structure in the face of a much nimbler Ukrainian fighting force. […] “Continuing to lose senior leaders is not good,” he said in an email. “Eventually, loss of leadership affects morale, fighting prowess and effectiveness.”

When morale and effectiveness starts out so low, it’s now a question of how Russia will keep things going at all. History suggests that there will be increasingly hostile speech and greater war crimes, increasing suffering.

In Chechnya and Syria dominance manifested in ruthless scorched-earth campaigns against civilians.

Ukraine however is rolling differently as Russia attempted a complex and rapid mobilization without having much of a clue.

“Even Stalin had an idea,” she said…to underscore Putin’s failure to articulate a reason for invading Ukraine.

Fukiyama’s March 10th prediction is most interesting to me because he suggested morale weakness may cause an abrupt end to Russian force.

The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize.

It may already be coming true, according to the latest reports.

“We shot at the first vehicle, and when it exploded the column stopped,” he says. “(Russian soldiers) ran away and we took their military equipment.” According to Golodov and his men, this is a common occurrence on the battlefield. “Russian soldiers are frightened, demoralized. They are afraid to part with each other, because they are being shot at from every bush,” he says. He says some seem to be very young and inexperienced: “Most of them do not know or understand why they are here.”

However, this doesn’t seem to take into account that Putin may attempt to boost morale by engaging in ever more destructive war crimes.

The intelligence report says Russia intends its ‘total destruction’ of Mariupol to ‘serve as a warning to other cities’. It said: ‘The pattern of destruction of food and water supplies, targeting of civilians, indiscriminate use of firepower to advance, is already being repeated elsewhere. This is based on effective lessons learned [by the Russians] in Syria.’

I don’t believe Russia is in any position to learn, but instead are prone to repetition and mysticism/fear. Thus dehumanization of people and targeting civilian areas is likely to increase as a form of desperation to demonstrate power (e.g. give demoralized troops a “reason” to be there), given how a paper bear has been blown away by any real resistance.

Not only is there mounting evidence that Russians didn’t think Putin would actually invade Russia, but that Putin is actively trying to censor obvious words used to criticize his failures.

Since March 4, 2022, censorship has been introduced in Russia : for anti-war statements, you can get up to 15 years in prison. It is also forbidden to call a war a war.

On March 10-13, we conducted a nationwide telephone survey, in which 1811 respondents took part (full data is available in the public domain). What did we see?

Respondents increasingly refuse to answer direct questions and give their place of residence, explaining that they do not want to go to prison.

This means that opinion polls no longer reflect real opinions. But thanks to them, you can find out the degree of intimidation of the respondents.

A country was called not a country and now it has become even more impossible to discuss Ukraine publicly in Russia because it now is a crime to call a war a war.

Much of the analysis I have seen so far about this misses the three points that (1) the Russians didn’t think Putin was so stupid he would go to war with Russia (given Putin claimed forever that Ukraine wasn’t a thing), (2) that Putin is necessarily surrounded by sycophants and incompetence (due to corruption and fraud inextricable from dictatorships that centralize power), and (3) that Russians aren’t happy about it, especially as their country looks more and more like Venezuela, but have limited methods or means for opposition.

More to the point perhaps is that Russian military intelligence has clumsily been trying to position a war they started as something right out of a white supremacist meme.

They want people to believe that Russia is a victim and its invasion of a neighboring state was “forced” upon them. This is similar to “pre-emptive” thinking of Nazi Germany, which allowed Hitler to advocate invasion of neighboring countries to stop a future attack that was completely fictionalized.

Also they want people believe that Russia is on a mission to destroy the “world-order” that is conspiring against them. This is similar to the racist thinking of Nazi Germany, which emboldened Hitler to perpetrate war crimes and genocide.

These two memes are variations of the theme that Russia is ready to go to extreme measures and ignore boundaries because it is “preserving” something and so fearful it must act out of desperation.

A counter-message narrative that comes from inside Russia thus has to be exceptionally careful to acknowledge the closed minds, closed borders of an insecure and fearful state.

Not only can broad swaths of messages be criminalized by Russia, as if it’s 1830s America trying to stop abolition of slavery, it might also have a problem of friendly-fire.
Recently I wrote about “protestware” so incredibly stupid that it blindly targeted Russian systems based on IP address alone and destroyed their files. In doing so, such un-intelligent acts of malice are likely to destroy systems necessary to help Russians trying to speak out against Russian abuses of power.

Rolling Stone has a detailed report on how America pressed forward confidently on chemical weapons cleanup after getting blank stares from their Russian counterparts.

In Geneva, as the team supporting Kerry was hammering out the details, it seemed like Russia had already lost interest in the endeavor. “We give them a piece of paper that says what we think the plan should be, and they just go, ‘Yeah, that looks fine to us,’ ” Cinnamon, who’d flown to Europe to aid negotiations, recalls. “They didn’t even look at it. They’re like, ‘I don’t care. You guys are going to fail. Write whatever you want.’ We kind of look at each other like, ‘Well, if we can write whatever we want, then . . . let’s just go for -everything.’ ”

This was perceived as indifference or apathy at the time because Americans vastly over-estimated the competence of Russian officials. The reason “they didn’t even look at it” and were like “don’t care” or “you guys are going to fail” is actually explained by basic incompetence of the Russian dictatorship.

It would be like showing the same things to someone in the Trump family.

Perhaps most interesting is that this amazing security operations success story both gives foreshadowing of Russian incompetence during the invasion of Ukraine, and also is done in a very modest context. The architects even say it would be awkward to boast about it while other work needs to be done. The best operators do not talk loudly about American operations.