Russia’s seemingly strong army

If one analyzed the 2008 Russo-Georgian war and the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war, one had to notice a number of things:

1. The Russo-Georgian War: Georgia is a tiny country with only 3.7 million inhabitants. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were part of Georgia before the war, but in 2008 the Russians forcibly tore these two small areas out of Georgia. – Abkhazia has a population of 245,000 and South Ossetia has a population of 54,000. Putin did not dare to go far. Why? The Russian leadership lied to the Russian soldiers that the brothers of the Russians were Abkhazians and Ossetians. But the Russian soldiers were still unmotivated. Local mercenary troops had to be recruited because (most of the) Russian soldiers refused to fight.
2. The Russo-Georgian war had another dimension, the Georgian army being a mini army, yet they were able to show serious resistance because they had American weapons, while the Russian military had only 20-30-40 year old weapons left over from Soviet times. Russian soldiers complained about bad weapons, so after 2008 Putin was forced to significantly increase the money spent on the army. But at the same time, the United States spent 10 times as much on armaments as the Russians, now 12 times the difference. Thus, the quality gap between Russian and American weapons only widened further. In early 2014, Putin launched a war against Ukraine. The Ukrainians also had Soviet fossil weapons, but Ukraine is a huge country of 44 million. Since then, the Ukrainian army has also received tanks, small arms and ammunition from Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians. Furthermore, Westerners have also begun to supply weapons to Ukraine on a smaller scale.
3. In 2014, it was the case that the Ukrainian army fired at a Russian armored vehicle. The scared Russian soldiers immediately laid down their weapons in front of the Ukrainians. It turned out that the Russian soldiers thought they were only participating in military exercises because the command told them that. They were ordered to go over a hill, which they did, but they did not know that it was already Ukraine. What is the lesson from this? There is not even a GPS in Russian military vehicles. The Russian military’s vehicle fleet is in terrible condition.
4. In the 2014 wars in Ukraine and 2008 in Georgia, it was the same that Russia was a tyrannical dictatorship and the Russian soldiers were passive in both cases, with only a few risking their lives for a tyrant named Putin and its political ambitions. In contrast, Ukraine and Georgia also have democracies. Their forces are defending their own country, so they are highly motivated.
5. Consequences of all this: in the first wave, the Russian elite units sent to Ukraine and the mercenary force were also beaten by the Ukrainian army. In the second wave, Putin was forced to deploy the Russian regular army to prevent a complete military collapse at all.

What do you need to know about Putin?

He worked for the KGB, but throughout its history, the KGB fought a single war, the Soviet-Afghan War, which ended in a terrible defeat. That is why former KGB Putin is wary of initiating an open, concrete war.

If you want to know more about this topic, you can find an e-book about it here.