Wartime Bureaucracy: Why Should We Fear Russia's “radicalization”?

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58894/EJPP.2023.2.477
war bureaucracy radicalization Ukraine Russia

Abstract

It is obvious that the Russian army which is strictly hierarchically organized is not only losing to the more decentralized and seemingly disorganized army of Ukraine but also that the Russian state itself, based on the same principle of highly centralized "vertical power", has proven inept, irreversible and ineffective, especially in the field of intelligence and the mobilization of soldiers and officers for the front. Is it a "systemic fallacy" about "Russia" or is it simply some "deviation" of the otherwise capable and effective strong-vertical of power in the Russian Federation, or is it just a "series of mistakes" by the military command? There are at least two arguments that point to the fact that we are dealing with a systemic nature of these problems.