Evidence is mounting that many Russian soldiers are reluctant to fight.
Social media is littered with videos of lost and hungry soldiers
looting,
begging for food or
ditching their tanks and trucks. Captured soldiers have expressed
confusion about the war’s purpose and have
surrendered once they discovered they were not on a
training exercise.
Hundreds of armored vehicles have been abandoned or captured by Ukrainian forces and, in at least one case, by a local
farmer.
Many of Russian equipment losses have been because of abandonment and capture, not destruction. Indeed, dozens of
videos of lines of stranded military equipment can be found on TikTok. Russian military authorities have
threatened physical abuse or worse to enforce discipline in some units. And Reuters correspondent Phil Stewart tweeted this earlier Tuesday:
The Russian Army has built-in problems that undermine morale
Scholars offer four reasons soldiers fight hard on the battlefield:
ideology, including nationalism and patriotism;
material benefits such as money; for
fellow soldiers; and
fear, including of one’s own commanders.
Like many armies, Russia’s military is marked by prewar inequalities between soldiers that undercut combat motivation. Take, for example, the status and economic hierarchies between contract soldiers, who make up about 70 percent of the military, and conscripts. Contract soldiers serve for three-year contracts, are paid fairly well (about
$1,100 a month) and are better-trained. As officers, they also enjoy numerous opportunities to engage in
corruption, including siphoning off conscript pay.
Conscripts, in contrast, are poorly trained, receiving four months of basic training, and serve for only a year, during which they are often victimized by their own contract officers, who often violently
haze young recruits. For their troubles, they are paid less than
$25 a month. Small wonder that there’s a robust
black market in seeking
deferments to avoid conscription. Poor pay and the chasm between contract soldiers and conscripts combine to undermine unit cohesion.