Wes O’Donnel: Inside Putin’s Dysfunctional Army: Has the Russian Military Improved at All?
When Russia performed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, I was shocked.
Not shocked that they invaded, but shocked at the sorry state of the Russian military. How did we in the US military and intelligence community get it so wrong? Did we have no intelligence assets embedded in the Russian MoD?
Early in the Ukraine War, the complete lack of professionalism on display by the Russian army surprised me and no doubt surprised thousands of other American veterans and commentators.
Since Putin came to power over two decades ago, the media has subjected us to stories of how Russia is modernizing their conventional (non-nuclear) military, creating super weapons, and investing in a fighting force capable of taking on NATO and the west.
Exhibit A: This New York Times article from just before the war started (which clearly has not aged well): Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal. HA, good one, NYT.
Even CIA estimates from February 2022 show that they expected Kyiv to fall within weeks.
Perhaps it was my fault. I had been raised all my life to prepare to fight the Russians. Movies like Red Dawn, Rocky IV, and even Top Gun sent countless 80s kids running to their local recruiter’s office ready to sign on the dotted line.
Personally, I joined for the college money… fighting Russians was just a bonus.
After September 11th, 2001, terrorists became the new boogey men. But Russia was always there in the background, quietly rebuilding their military.
Or were they?
Grab a coffee, or something stronger.
We are well past the “gee, that convoy sure looks stuck” phase of analysis.
It is 2025, the fog has lifted a bit, and we can finally say what many of us suspected the first week of this war: Russia’s army looks dangerous on parade, then trips over its own bootlaces as soon as the shooting starts.
Yes, some parts got meaner and smarter. No, the fundamentals did not.
The myth that would not die
For two decades we were told a bedtime story: Russia, humiliated in the 1990s, had retooled into a sleek, lethal force.
New tanks with space-age names. Stealth fighters. Cyber wizards. Armatas. A bear in carbon fiber.
Reality check: the modernization budget bought a small number of show ponies and a large number of villas.
Corruption is not a side quest in the Russian system, it is the game engine. You cannot build a modern army when every procurement link is a tollbooth and every tollbooth has a cousin with a yacht.
The other half of the myth was on us. We underestimated Ukrainian ingenuity, morale, and talent. Ukraine did not wait for perfect kit or permission. It hacked its way to an advantage, on the ground, in the air, and at sea.
But the most lethal Russian weakness was culture. Instead of “one team, one fight”, you got fiefdoms.
Regular units, Rosgvardia, Airborne, mercenary leftovers, Chechen formations, occupation police, Wagner; all guarding turf and information like it was 1993.
No shared after-action reports. No honest debrief culture. No habit of admitting errors. If a battalion drives into a minefield at dawn, the next battalion is jogging past the same marker stones at lunch.
When knowledge is hoarded, you pay in blood to rediscover what your comrade learned yesterday.
This is not a training problem, it is a command problem. Initiative is punished. Bad news is career-ending. The safest plan is the last plan, even if it failed.
This is still haunting the Russian military today and is largely why Ukraine has kept Russia confined to Crimea and the Eastern direction. To a (former) American soldier and airman, this is crazy. You would think that after four years of tiny, incremental progress, some commander (perhaps even Putin himself) would say “Welp, this shit ain’t working, let’s do something different.”
But let’s be fair. The invaders did improve in a few nasty, consequential ways.
Electronic warfare (EW) got meaner. Ukraine is the densest EW environment on earth. Russia layered jammers and spoofers until the air between trenches crackled. They forced Ukrainian drones to evolve, then evolve again. This is the one Russian enterprise that does routinely iterates. No one knows which Russian soldier invented fiber-optic FPV drones, to defeat Ukrainian electronic warfare. Some opportunistic mid-level Russian officer will likely take credit once the war ends.
But as much as I’ve criticized the Russian military’s battle acumen over the past [nearly] four years of war, I must admit that occasionally, the lumbering, top-heavy military of Mother Russia births an idea worth copying.
Indeed, using FPV drones as cheap, steerable baby bombs, at scale, was Ukraine’s brainchild.
So, this is a great example of wartime copying (Ukraine invents, Russia copies), followed by iteration and improvement (Russia turned FPVs into un-jammable fiber drones), followed by copying again (Ukraine copies fiber drones) … Then, Ukraine creates additional improvements: Ukraine launches fiber drones from a boat, which is itself a drone.
But Russia has not only improved in EW.
Glide bombs became their hammer. Strap a cheap guidance kit to a 500-kilogram bomb and drop it from outside Ukrainian SAM envelopes. It’s far from elegant, but it collapses strongpoints and makes every daylight movement miserable.
Russia leaned into this, and it shows. Defense in depth turned cruel. Mines, trench belts, obstacles, pre-registered fires. In certain sectors the Russians became very good at not losing ground.
Offense still eludes them, but their idea of customer service is now making your attack as expensive as possible.
Iranian drones, copied at scale, is another big improvement.
Russia took the Shahed and created their own version (called the Geran). These delta-wing drones are extremely easy to mass-produce and that’s exactly what Russia did. Flooding Ukrainian skies with these cheap cruise missiles is a rare instance of intelligence coming out of the Russian MoD.
Then again, they only turned to Iran after they had almost exhausted their own high-end precision munitions like the Kalibr and the Iskander in late 2023. The Shahed design bought them time to slowly start replenishing their stocks of these precision missiles.
The fundamentals they still butcher
Okay, enough praise. Where are the Russians still stumbling?
Joint operations remain a rumor.
Air, armor, infantry, EW, and artillery still meet each other like strangers at a bus stop.
Close air support is sporadic and timid due to fear of Ukrainian air defense. Deconfliction is poor. Friendly fire still happens all the time. When a Russian attack succeeds, it is usually because of mass, not choreography.
Command climate is fear, not trust. Replace a general, yell at a colonel, threaten a private.
That is not leadership, that is a sitcom. Officers are terrified of initiative. NCOs are nonexistent. Bad news moves up the chain slower than a draft notice.
Logistics got clever in places, but the spine is brittle.
Russia adapted around some strike pressures, dispersed ammo, used rail cunningly, and learned to hide.
But the machine still groans. Fuel, spares, and rotations remain patchy. When Ukrainians hit the right node, entire sectors lock up.
Manpower is meat, not a force. Mobilization filled trenches, not units. Discipline is enforced by barrier troops and prison battalions, which tells you everything you need to know about morale.
Elite formations burned out early and were re-skinned with new patches. By the way, wearing a cool unit patch does not magically grant you all the attributes of the men who came before you.
Corruption persists like mold, and they are fresh out of bleach.
You can bolt a cage on a turret and call it innovation, but it’s also a confession. Too much Russian “adaptation” is a field fix for a procurement failure.
You know who did learn together? Ukrainians with laptops, engineers with lathes, and sailors without ships.
Ukrainian sea drones rewrote the map. The Black Sea Fleet retreated, not out of politeness, but because getting hit while docked was suddenly a lifestyle risk. Once you can strike harbors with remote robots, steel tonnage matters less than software tempo.
That same lesson keeps echoing inland. Refineries go pop, rail nodes go quiet, depots light up. You do not need to destroy the whole machine.
You make it leak. And it is leaking.
Then there is the lack of SOPs and ROEs (Standard Operating Procedures and Rules of Engagement).
Western forces treat procedures like living documents.
In the US military, you fight, you debrief, you update, you repeat. What went right? What went wrong? How can we improve performance on the next mission? How can we operate more safely? How can we kill more enemies next time? This cycle of continuous improvement even has a name in the US Air Force: Flawless execution.
Russia treats procedures like a laminate card you carry until it dissolves in your pocket. This is why you still see assaults that look like 2022, just with more drones over them.
There are bright spots in Russian defense SOPs, especially around static positions. But a modern army that cannot learn as a whole is a historical reenactment group with extra paperwork.
The sorry state of the individual Russian soldier is no better now than in 2022.
Discipline, commitment, or skill. Pick two, on a good day.
Discipline is not shouting, it is doing the boring thing correctly, every time, especially when nobody watches.
Commitment is not singing on a parade square; it is staying in the fight when every instinct says go home.
Skill is where the rubber meets the road. In the 101st Airborne, why did we go to the shooting range every other day for years? It’s all about turning the skills of our jobs into muscle memory.
Too many Russian units still lack all three, discipline, commitment, and skill, at scale.
There are brave, competent Russian soldiers. There always are.
But the system they serve rewards the wrong behavior and punishes the right kind. That is why their best keep dying first and their worst keep getting promoted.
While Russia has been largely stagnating in place, the Ukrainians have been under constant improvement.
Ukraine institutionalized learning at war speed. Kropyva apps. Ad hoc C2 networks. Drone schools. A thousand garages turned to labs.
The superpower is not any single widget, it is the mindset. Push authority down. Share what works. Kill dumb ideas fast. Scale good ideas faster.
If you want to understand the asymmetry, it is this: Ukraine’s kill chain is a mesh. Russia’s is a pipe.
But Wes, has Russia “learned” enough to grind out a win?
I’m glad you asked! Short answer, no. Long answer, they learned just enough to avoid losing quickly. They did not learn how to win. They can seize a village by erasing it with glide bombs, then walk into the rubble and plant a flag. That is not victory, that is gravity.
Russia can still do damage.
It can still take ground in places.
It can still make Ukraine bleed.
But everything Russia does better now is either unsustainably expensive, brutally wasteful, or strategically brittle. None of it fixes the original sin, which is a command culture that cannot handle truth.
NATO still has lessons it can learn from Ukraine
To my colleagues in NATO: Stop pretending agility and oversight are enemies. You can move fast and test hard.
Field attritable layers, not boutique unicorns. Buy ammunition like your life depends on it, because it does. Treat software as a weapon, not an attachment. Empower sergeants. Fund the boring connective tissue between sensors and shooters. Reward honest debriefs, even when they sting.
Most of all, accept that the side that learns fastest wins. Not the side with the shiniest brochure.
Russia will keep leaning on Shahed (Gerans), glide bombs, mass, and EW. Ukraine will keep counter-punching with drones, long-range fires, and creativity. The economic pressure inside Russia will keep rising as oil refineries burn and manpower drains.
The politics will keep oscillating. The stakes will not go down.
If you want an easy narrative, you picked the wrong war. If you want a truthful one, here it is: Ukraine keeps making a bigger army look clumsy because it thinks like a startup and fights like a citizenry.
Russia keeps making a bigger army look fragile because it thinks like a court and fights like a bureaucracy.
I said it in 2022, and I will say it again now. Ukraine wins by learning faster than Moscow can lie to itself. On most days that is exactly what we are watching.
