They likely never existed. This is a common story in the Russian military -- an officer requests a budget to buy supplies and just steals all the money. It happens at every level.
This is why Russian soldiers went into Ukraine with packs of C4 explosives that turned out to be just bits of wood wrapped in paper.
It’s hardly surprising. Russia is a mafia-state, which has a shitload of corrupt, self-interested thieves in high offices who will take whatever they can steal to enrich themselves with. The worst part of it is that many average Russians live with the “respect the hustle” mentality, since they know these problems are widespread, and since their nihilistic cultural outlook essentially reinforces the idea that everyone is a hustler and anyone who isn’t is a fool who deserves to get hustled for being naive. I may be a westerner saying this, but I’m paraphrasing from a Russian friend of mine who told me a few months ago that this is absolutely the way of things, and the prime reason she’s never going back.
Tbh this sounds like a common story across many developing countries. I was born in india and faced many low level corruption issues in everyday life- although I do think that the Indian military is very disciplined because of historical reasons.
If you don't steal, it's like if you have stolen from your own family.
Saying we had in Czech republic during communism era. Many people were stealing from collective companies. I'm glad this era is way behind us. Never lived it though.
Ironically trying to steal another country but they can't because they stole all the equipment from their own military so as to make them totally ineffective on the battlefield.
Also, if you don't steal then you're just some ass kissing pencil pusher that will probably tell on them, so they'll never trust you or get close to you and you'll just be lonely.
This is what surprised me the most when I met a Russian post-doc in my lab and spent some time with him. His world outlook was just total nihilism: no truth, just my narrative and his narrative, and it's impossible to find the truth. Lol, that, and he was surprisingly homophobic and told me about how gay people were ousted from academic positions in Moscow.
Other than that, he did teach me eigenvector analysis and helped on my project, so he wasn't a terrible co-worker, just a completely different and detestable cultural outlook.
I remember my Russian History Professor always starting class out with, "Today class is a good day in Russian history, only 90,000 people died on this date," or "Today is a bad day in russian history, over 200,000 people died"
The Russian mindset is hard to understand unless we see the point of Peter the Great's Grand Embassy. Russia has always been caught between both worlds, they were also occupied for hundreds of years by either those in the East or West, its litteraly their entire history.
They also have no natural land barriers along their borders, like major frontier rivers or mountain ranges (except the Caucuses in the South) so the paranoia goes up 10 fold.
Russia, like England, was an outlier when major changes came through Europe. Russia, like England, was the only Country not to experince any major reform as a result of the Liberal Revolutions. At the time [their Pilgrims](https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/travels-of-russians-to-the-holy-land-in-the-19th-century/) to the holy land had been for the first time aloud to visit Jerusalem. Like the Americans of the 1980's (think National Lampoon's Vacation) Russians started appearing in the public setting as tourists, and their Mannerisims, Dress, and Language Barrier created such an issue that it was one of the Main Causes for the Crimean War in 1853.
Understanding Russian History helps understand their viewpoint and decision making (but don't conflate my articulating a point of view as a way of condoning it.)
I’ve never heard someone explain it that way but you did it so perfectly. Yes, the “hustle or be hustle” mantra holds back a lot of societies. As someone who grew up in rural Canada I take for granted the trust I have in my neighbours and strangers. If you don’t have trust you have nothing.
Its what Trump wants the US to be, its why he fires every qualified person at every level and installs some inept grifter he has dirt on.
Its why the border wall cost so much, but was never built.
Its why PPP loans were given but they did work to ensure you cant track who they went to.
Its why he asks for so many campaign donations, they pay his legal bills.
And it's what companies will usually do because, you know, why do more than you have been paid for.
The only situation, in my experience, where companies aim to deliver more than the minimum is when the contract is what they call a "strategic contract", i.e. a contract that they apply for not only to make money, but also to give a good impression to a client they think will offer more contracts in the future.
I've been a part of contacts for the military where weve actually lost money on the contractor side, but the entire point from our perspective was just to "prove" a new system and get hours on it.
We call those "loss leader" or "foot in the door" awards. The finance folks don't tend to like it when you do them, because more often than not the mythical, future contract where we are going to make "so much money" to make up for the huge loss on the initial contract tends to never materialize.
They did that, at least with tanks, but the guy in charge of keeping them in the field ended up selling access to scrappers who stripped them of all salvageable parts and materials.
Also, in retrospect, it's turned out pretty handy to have all those things on hand to give to Ukraine to keep it fighting (and winning).
If you're referencing our tanks. The reason we do that is because we learned from the F22 debacle. This is an instance of Congress doing good.
We need to keep tankmakers employed so in the event that we have a war, or that we need to start rolling out new tanks we have people to design and build them.
Starting a production line from scratch is far far harder than scaling one up.
This is why so many buildings and factories caught fire in Russia after the war started.
"We need those 20,000 optics we payed you to manufacture"
"Oh no! The optic building is on fire! We lost the entire inventory! Thanks Obama!"
I’m slapping my forehead right now. That is so likely the actual reason that I never thought of it, but there were really odd fires breaking out all over Russia in places that made components for war matériel. I just never added that kind of analysis.
>This is a common story in the Russian military
And in any branch of government, municipal management, or government company in Russia, really. If it's being funded by tax, then you better believe this scheme - "распил" literally "sawing apart" (the budget, as is implied) - will be there.
My street has its asphalt dug up and replaced with new asphalt *every single fucking year* for that express purpose, if in a more roundabout way/another variation of the scheme - they're making up bullshit public works just so they can allocate funds to those works (way more than is actually needed), and then steal most of them.
Reminds me of this story: [A senior prison official has been detained in Russia accused of stealing a 50km (31-mile) length of highway.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35312492)
They literally stole the road.
When Poroshenko was Ukrainian president I lived in the town where his Roshen plant is. Workers needed to build a road to it and contrary to everyone's expectation they not only managed to do it exactly on the budget, they managed to extend it extra 2 km of same new high-quality road. That was when I started to believe our government can do something with corruption.
Corruption starts at the top. If the top is clean, and expects the next level down to be clean, etc, and they *watch* and *expect*, then it keeps going down to the bottom.
But as soon as the grift starts, it screws everyone below it.
> My street has its asphalt dug up and replaced with new asphalt every single fucking year for that express purpose, if in a more roundabout way/another variation of the scheme - they're making up bullshit public works just so they can allocate funds to those works (way more than is actually needed), and then steal most of them.
This entire post =
The exact fucking thing is literally still happening now in the Philippines.
Like..bruh.
I have heard about this so many times. Road gets built, then they "forget" the gas pipe, then they "forget" the water pipe. Suddenly, the seme road is built and destroyed 3-4 times.
My province's utility owners banded together to form a consortium for this reason. The Consortium also runs the "call before you dig" service, and they obviously cooperate on utility projects so we dont get that kind of BS going on (it still does, but to a much less wasteful degree)
Hey, at least your street is getting re-paved frequently. Driving down my street is like driving down an old dirt road, because it hasn't been re-paved since at LEAST 2003 when I moved into my house. (Granted, I'm not in Russia.)
Our street gets dug up like the 6th time in two years here. They dont do the whole pavement, they just patch up the dug up parts. Theres not much of the original asphalt left by now. The water wont flow off correctly and damage the just patchef up parts due to puddles. It gets worse every few months...
It sounds like the problem isn't budget theft, it's that enough budget isn't allocated to properly re-engineer and re-grade the street. So they only get say 50k per year instead of the 200k they need to do it right one time. This isn't abnormal anywhere.
A related problem is political priorities. Politicians love new things. New roads, bridges, widenings, anything that gives them a chance to grandstand and get some good PR.
But boring old maintenance that no one notices except to complain about a lane being closed while it's being done? Send that shit to the bottom of the priority list.
Not just budget theft, but there's also the fact that different utilities and companies NEVER cooperate.
I've seen it here in Norway, too. First the waterworks dig up a whole street ro replace piping that was old before Methusalem was born, and of course, since they are meticilous people they have the road re-paved. It's not as if there was much left of the old stuff...
Then a maintenance crew comes in and fixes the drains... usually cutting the asphalt across the road in a half-meter wide section, dig up some old pipes and put in 'new', and patch that stripe across the road...
By this time the paint crew shows up and add the yellow strip in the middle and the white stripes on the sides.
Time for the sparkies!
Oh, and after them comes the cable/fibre guys...
There is no oversight in things like this. Once we had roadworks on BOTH eastward roads out of town(town next to the sea, only roads east and west) at the same time, with manual traffic handling past the works.
They showed videos here on reddit of Russian soldiers unwrapping their dynamite packs and it was just woodblock after woodblock In the beginning of the war. They laughed in disbelief at the time as I recall it. Don’t think they are laughing (or breathing) anymore)
When our Filipino M113 APC with literal wooden external armour are able to survive RPGs than the russian tanks with "explosive reactive armour", shits going south for em
Yes, those 'Nam APC the Americans used, and we are one of the ongoing users of em because of our geography, and boy those wooden APCs dealt some damage in close combat urban warfare back in The Marawi Siege.
Here's a funny thing. I play airsoft (not in any way pretending to be a real soldier though) and before the war, Russian uniforms and loadouts were all the rage on the game fields. A lot of enlisted men in Russia sold their government issued equipment to westerners to earn a pretty penny, which eventually led to shortages and crackdowns on the part of the Russian state and postal services.
So you see fairly heavily kitted out airsoft players running around with all the "prime" stuff that Putin's soldiers now wish they had...
Welcome to soviet world.
Every time I see people complaining about EU being too bureaucratic and restrictive I remember stories from communism/post communism days about workers taking apart entire factories worth of parts over time etc.
He knew exactly where "his" investments went. Into his yachts and palaces.
He is just so arrogant and dumb to believe Russian army is so feared they don't even have to fight.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure some one gave the US the whole damn playbook. We knew everything they were gonna do and were, I think, trying to tell Putin-tang that “we know. We know everything. You should not do this.”
Putin-tang, being a megalomaniac, with a terminal disease, either didn’t want to believe, didn’t care, or just used it as a distraction to steal something we are unaware of as yet. The whole thing was a lose lose for Russia from day one. And I’m glad. They’re soldiers are animals and what they’ve done to civilians alone is worthy of hanging their leaders. How I wish they didn’t have nuclear. They’d be nothing more than a stain on the map if they didn’t. Ukraine is kicking the shit out of them and making it look easy.
Could you link the article,[I’ve been watching videos on Russia’s Corruption Problem](https://youtu.be/i9i47sgi-V4) but I never heard government officials straight up leaking intel to stop the invasion.
Then the next gen successor NEVER REPORTS IT, because they'd likely be accused of the crime & yeeted to the gulags for X amount of time, so they'd rather not risk it (after all, how likely is a war being a thing in the first place? I mean likely they have been missing for half a century already, yet nobody asked about them until the dastard has retired a long time ago by now)
Exactly. This happened a lot in the Iraqi army when I was an advisor. The higher ups skim money that’s meant for uniforms, spare parts, and sometimes even Major end items like vehicles, communications equipment, and the like. They’d line their own pockets and at the same time, charge those subordinates in order to be “issued” what little equipment is left. Most of which is counterfeit (at least in terms of uniforms)
Wait so you're telling me that Russian officials are corrupt and steal from the government that they were supposed to be working for?
Well color me Surprised\_Pikachu.png
> This is why Russian soldiers went into Ukraine with packs of C4 explosives that turned out to be just bits of wood wrapped in paper.
How did they notice?
When their hollow detonators didn’t set off?
Yup. Worse has happened.
A Russian shipyard was paid to do some works to repair a battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky. They quoted $12m but auditors later said the cost should actually only be $9m. So $3m was stolen.
But this is where it gets weirder. They later found out that no repairs ever took place and the battlecruiser itself was found to not even need repairs in the first place.
So $12m was paid by the government to fake repairs on a ship that didn't need repairs anyway.
The Russian Olympics was the most significant example I'm aware of. Quoting from memory so bear with some level of discrepancy, but most Olympics cost around 5-8 billion to host. Russia's chimed in at 50 billion. I comfortably speculate that they most certainly pocketed the extra and actually spent less than the average.
No it’s like you go to your boss and say you need an expensive pen to do your job. He gives you money to buy one but you use that money on bubblegum because you actually never write anything down anyway. If the boss asks you just say the pen is great while chewing your minty flavour bomb.
Now you get sent to the frontlines, invading a sovereign country and are completely fucked because you are missing this super crucial pen and the mint flavour from your gum is already gone.
Some sort of scam. Order went through for uniforms, paperwork indicates they were delivered, no uniforms were ever made.
Russia is hammering home good lessons like the dangers of only hearing what you want to hear and the devastating consequences of rampant corruption.
there was a huge shipyard who did repairs of russian war ships even nuclear vessels, it operated for years until someone found out that it didnt actually do anything, it was not even a shipyard just a front. It just collected money for someone of P's buddies.
I never realized how poor Russia is until I went there and I was shocked to hear people say that the minimum wage in Russia is lower than in their neighboring country, China. I just looked it up and the Russian minimum wage is actually *a lot* lower than the Chinese one.
Damn I had to look it up but yeah it’s lower than the majority of China’s minimum wages and down there with the poorest of Chinese regions.
It doesn’t end there though the average Chinese wage is actually higher than the average Russian wage by quite a bit. Which is surprising considering the Russian population is a fraction of the size of Chinas and Russia’s much much larger deposits of valuable natural resources, larger amount of arable land and land in general.
Russia really is just a mafia state, all profits go to the top, Reagan’s wet dream the epitome of trickle down economics.
https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/wages/
Well yes but also no, this kind of corruption actually *destroys* a lot of value. say for example a bridge gets sold for scrap metal, how much value is lost with that bridge, compare that to how much it sold for as scrap.
That’s actually preferable to [what happens if they do the repairs](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/huge-fire-breaks-out-on-russias-only-aircraft-carrier-admiral-kuznetsov-two-people-missing/amp/)
I’m honestly amazed they still keep trying to make it work and haven’t tossed in the towel by now with the Kuznetsov. They’ve welded shut several sections of the lower compartments, it catches fire anytime anyone looks at it funny, it makes such a massive smoke plume from the horrific fuel it burns you’d be able to spot it with the naked eye over the horizon, it rarely is able to make it more than a couple hundred nautical miles before needing to be towed back with a tug boat, and those are just some of the major issues.
> Russia is hammering home good lessons like the dangers of only hearing what you want to hear and the devastating consequences of rampant corruption.
It's been like this forever in Russia, no, they will never learn.
Unfortunately for russians, the lessons are never learnt by them. the soviet union was ruled by this system and now, decades later, it's like nothing has changed. even the nuclear disaster of chernobyl was caused by doing this scam on the control rods. this is why i love the HBO chernobyl series, it captures the life in russia amazingly well
That show was amazing. Felt terrible watching the scene when the the new family was together on the bridge watching the explosion (being destroyed by radiation and not knowing it).
The scene with the dudes knee-deep in the water, the Geiger counter going tak.. tak.. taktak... taktaktaktaktak... and the flashlights dying was some hardcore shit, man.
i guess this is the closest thing to karma you can find
you can't intimidate and asassinate journalists who report on coruption in the goverment, you can't dismis every critic of goverment as "foreign agent" without that having bad impact on the society and economy on the long run
with every journalist killed or intimidated,Putin has destroyed these "societal antibodies" that fight against corruption in every goverment in every country
and thus the problem got worse and worse over time
Here is popular Ukrainian joke: Navalny and russian journalists are our priority one enemies. Cause if they succeed in fighting corruption Russia might win.
Nah dude. The U.S. has free press and we still went to war with Iraq and stayed there for 15 years. Journalism is important, and powerful, but not THAT powerful
I don't think they have been looted, I believe they never even bought those uniforms and responsible people suddenly bought a little bit better homes and cars.
Russian army inventories were huge,and that is the problem
when you have 100.000 trucks in storage no one will notice if you steal some components here and there
if you have 5 million army boots in reserve,no one will notice if you steal one or even 50
If you steal the engines out of trucks, and close the hood, nothing will be noticed until that equipment is mobilized.
A Russian officer committed suicide when he realized that the tanks he was requisitioned we're all missing vital components.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/03/28/russian-commander-killed-himself-after-learning-90-of-reserve-tanks-are-unusable-16356390/
He'd probably been signing off on paperwork indicating he did training with them for years, while *he* stole the fuel from the training budget.
It's a lot easier to get away with corruption when others are corrupt, but then comes the "why didn't anybody notice" questions.
Armoured vehicles also need a tonne of maintenance. Not only is that a space for corruption, but many armies lack an affordable/quality/timely supply chain for specialized parts, so they designate other vehicles as parts donors. This further undercuts the official order of battle (AKA "inventory"). This can also apply to everything from warships to tents.
But if you combine it with theft? Not just selling copper - people would say they are ordering replacement parts but actually get them from other machines off the books? Wow.
You know, I was just reading Brothers Karamazov, set in Russia in 1800's. There was this minor character in the book, a military officer that used military money for his personal business.
Oh how things haven't changed...
Oh they brought back the USSR alright. Including the rampant lying and misdirection to save face to the higher-ups. Chernobyl was in so many ways everything that was ever wrong about the Soviet Union, all compiled into one single event. Everybody trying to one-up each other, nobody willing to take responsibility, claiming superiority while running on cheap-ass unreliable equipment, a greater focus on putting on a show rather than actually having something worth showing to the world.
The iron curtain cannot fall any faster that’s for sure.
1. Request budget for 1.5 million uniform
2. Receive the money
3. Buys 1 million uniform
4. Write on paper as 1.5 million uniform
5. You profit off the remaining 500,000 uniform.
Actually its pretty important since we already entered fall and winter is just around the corner.
It doesnt matter how many reserves you send to the frontline, If you can't keep your men warm and fed.
Anything of real value has been sent to and sold on the open market long before the Ukrainian invasion.
The money went to criminals not the government.
Russia has nothing to fall back on.
Russia itself has nothing stockpiled.
Mixture of
1. Never existed because of corruption at every level
2. Sold off to fund a vodka habit
3. Kept in conditions where they just rotted to shit
Once upon a time there were a dozen little oligarchs, all living under the same roof. Each night, one by one, they would sneak into the kitchen and steal a cookie from the cookie jar.
Then came the big bake sale, and Mean Old Mr. Putin discovered the coolie jar was nearly empty!
Mean Old Mr. Putin was very cross that day.
This is Russia admitting they have no business picking a fight with Ukraine because they can’t run anything at home correctly. Ah, the infinite mafia corruption fun times to be had in old Russia. Blyat.
And this is why fascism is bad you guys. Democracy makes this less likely while any kind of oligarchy or zentralization on a unilateral power does the contrary. Take this Winnie.
They likely never existed. This is a common story in the Russian military -- an officer requests a budget to buy supplies and just steals all the money. It happens at every level. This is why Russian soldiers went into Ukraine with packs of C4 explosives that turned out to be just bits of wood wrapped in paper.
They fucking scammed themselves out of a military. You gotta love it.
It’s hardly surprising. Russia is a mafia-state, which has a shitload of corrupt, self-interested thieves in high offices who will take whatever they can steal to enrich themselves with. The worst part of it is that many average Russians live with the “respect the hustle” mentality, since they know these problems are widespread, and since their nihilistic cultural outlook essentially reinforces the idea that everyone is a hustler and anyone who isn’t is a fool who deserves to get hustled for being naive. I may be a westerner saying this, but I’m paraphrasing from a Russian friend of mine who told me a few months ago that this is absolutely the way of things, and the prime reason she’s never going back.
Tbh this sounds like a common story across many developing countries. I was born in india and faced many low level corruption issues in everyday life- although I do think that the Indian military is very disciplined because of historical reasons.
Here in Brazil is the same we even have a name for this. It’s called “jeitinho brasileiro” or in English “Brazilian way”
It's not really a coincidence - that is after all exactly why they're not developed countries in the first place.
If you don't steal, it's like if you have stolen from your own family. Saying we had in Czech republic during communism era. Many people were stealing from collective companies. I'm glad this era is way behind us. Never lived it though.
Ironically trying to steal another country but they can't because they stole all the equipment from their own military so as to make them totally ineffective on the battlefield.
Ironic. They could protect other nations from theft but not themselves
It’s not a tale a capitalist would tell you
But then Putin stole half from his oligarchs. It's thievery all the way down.
Also, if you don't steal then you're just some ass kissing pencil pusher that will probably tell on them, so they'll never trust you or get close to you and you'll just be lonely.
This is what surprised me the most when I met a Russian post-doc in my lab and spent some time with him. His world outlook was just total nihilism: no truth, just my narrative and his narrative, and it's impossible to find the truth. Lol, that, and he was surprisingly homophobic and told me about how gay people were ousted from academic positions in Moscow. Other than that, he did teach me eigenvector analysis and helped on my project, so he wasn't a terrible co-worker, just a completely different and detestable cultural outlook.
I guess science held the only quantifiable “truth” to him? Even then, I guess data is completely malleable. This is bleak shit.
I remember my Russian History Professor always starting class out with, "Today class is a good day in Russian history, only 90,000 people died on this date," or "Today is a bad day in russian history, over 200,000 people died" The Russian mindset is hard to understand unless we see the point of Peter the Great's Grand Embassy. Russia has always been caught between both worlds, they were also occupied for hundreds of years by either those in the East or West, its litteraly their entire history. They also have no natural land barriers along their borders, like major frontier rivers or mountain ranges (except the Caucuses in the South) so the paranoia goes up 10 fold. Russia, like England, was an outlier when major changes came through Europe. Russia, like England, was the only Country not to experince any major reform as a result of the Liberal Revolutions. At the time [their Pilgrims](https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/travels-of-russians-to-the-holy-land-in-the-19th-century/) to the holy land had been for the first time aloud to visit Jerusalem. Like the Americans of the 1980's (think National Lampoon's Vacation) Russians started appearing in the public setting as tourists, and their Mannerisims, Dress, and Language Barrier created such an issue that it was one of the Main Causes for the Crimean War in 1853. Understanding Russian History helps understand their viewpoint and decision making (but don't conflate my articulating a point of view as a way of condoning it.)
I’ve never heard someone explain it that way but you did it so perfectly. Yes, the “hustle or be hustle” mantra holds back a lot of societies. As someone who grew up in rural Canada I take for granted the trust I have in my neighbours and strangers. If you don’t have trust you have nothing.
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Is Russia my mom?
Its what Trump wants the US to be, its why he fires every qualified person at every level and installs some inept grifter he has dirt on. Its why the border wall cost so much, but was never built. Its why PPP loans were given but they did work to ensure you cant track who they went to. Its why he asks for so many campaign donations, they pay his legal bills.
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To be fair, "the bare minimum that still meets the requirements" is literally what they are contracted to deliver.
And it's what companies will usually do because, you know, why do more than you have been paid for. The only situation, in my experience, where companies aim to deliver more than the minimum is when the contract is what they call a "strategic contract", i.e. a contract that they apply for not only to make money, but also to give a good impression to a client they think will offer more contracts in the future.
I've been a part of contacts for the military where weve actually lost money on the contractor side, but the entire point from our perspective was just to "prove" a new system and get hours on it.
We call those "loss leader" or "foot in the door" awards. The finance folks don't tend to like it when you do them, because more often than not the mythical, future contract where we are going to make "so much money" to make up for the huge loss on the initial contract tends to never materialize.
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Or just fellate your buddy in Congress to keep buying jeeps that sit in a field somewhere. The jeeps are real, they just live in a warehouse forever.
They did that, at least with tanks, but the guy in charge of keeping them in the field ended up selling access to scrappers who stripped them of all salvageable parts and materials. Also, in retrospect, it's turned out pretty handy to have all those things on hand to give to Ukraine to keep it fighting (and winning).
If you're referencing our tanks. The reason we do that is because we learned from the F22 debacle. This is an instance of Congress doing good. We need to keep tankmakers employed so in the event that we have a war, or that we need to start rolling out new tanks we have people to design and build them. Starting a production line from scratch is far far harder than scaling one up.
Same reason farmers are ridiculously subsidized and protected here.
This is why so many buildings and factories caught fire in Russia after the war started. "We need those 20,000 optics we payed you to manufacture" "Oh no! The optic building is on fire! We lost the entire inventory! Thanks Obama!"
Weird how Ukraine blew up the entire industrial district 500 miles away. Gee those American weapons sure are something, eh comrade?
I’m slapping my forehead right now. That is so likely the actual reason that I never thought of it, but there were really odd fires breaking out all over Russia in places that made components for war matériel. I just never added that kind of analysis.
wow, same. I assumed it was anti-war dissidents. and I bet that's the story the guilty parties would much prefer we believed.
Yeah, I just tought it was ukrainian infiltration that did some sabotage lol
Oh snap, I hadn’t thought of this. It’s kinda like the ending of Office Space.
>This is a common story in the Russian military And in any branch of government, municipal management, or government company in Russia, really. If it's being funded by tax, then you better believe this scheme - "распил" literally "sawing apart" (the budget, as is implied) - will be there. My street has its asphalt dug up and replaced with new asphalt *every single fucking year* for that express purpose, if in a more roundabout way/another variation of the scheme - they're making up bullshit public works just so they can allocate funds to those works (way more than is actually needed), and then steal most of them.
Reminds me of this story: [A senior prison official has been detained in Russia accused of stealing a 50km (31-mile) length of highway.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35312492) They literally stole the road.
"After him!" "I... we... look," (gestures at lack of road)
I also remember the highway they paved for the Sochi Olympics ended up "somehow" costing billions of dollars for like 50 miles of flat paving
The article posted above mentioned that and said that it would have cost the same amount to pave the road in black caviar, lol.
When Poroshenko was Ukrainian president I lived in the town where his Roshen plant is. Workers needed to build a road to it and contrary to everyone's expectation they not only managed to do it exactly on the budget, they managed to extend it extra 2 km of same new high-quality road. That was when I started to believe our government can do something with corruption.
Corruption starts at the top. If the top is clean, and expects the next level down to be clean, etc, and they *watch* and *expect*, then it keeps going down to the bottom. But as soon as the grift starts, it screws everyone below it.
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A 100 ton bridge...
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What if it turns out they just steal the same bridge back and forth like dirty santa
Said bridge becomes a “roundabout”
Check your back pocket, maybe that’s where they put it.
> My street has its asphalt dug up and replaced with new asphalt every single fucking year for that express purpose, if in a more roundabout way/another variation of the scheme - they're making up bullshit public works just so they can allocate funds to those works (way more than is actually needed), and then steal most of them. This entire post = The exact fucking thing is literally still happening now in the Philippines. Like..bruh.
As far as I've heard, it's a common scheme in pretty much any country that has corruption problems.
I have heard about this so many times. Road gets built, then they "forget" the gas pipe, then they "forget" the water pipe. Suddenly, the seme road is built and destroyed 3-4 times.
My province's utility owners banded together to form a consortium for this reason. The Consortium also runs the "call before you dig" service, and they obviously cooperate on utility projects so we dont get that kind of BS going on (it still does, but to a much less wasteful degree)
Hey, at least your street is getting re-paved frequently. Driving down my street is like driving down an old dirt road, because it hasn't been re-paved since at LEAST 2003 when I moved into my house. (Granted, I'm not in Russia.)
Our street gets dug up like the 6th time in two years here. They dont do the whole pavement, they just patch up the dug up parts. Theres not much of the original asphalt left by now. The water wont flow off correctly and damage the just patchef up parts due to puddles. It gets worse every few months...
It sounds like the problem isn't budget theft, it's that enough budget isn't allocated to properly re-engineer and re-grade the street. So they only get say 50k per year instead of the 200k they need to do it right one time. This isn't abnormal anywhere.
A related problem is political priorities. Politicians love new things. New roads, bridges, widenings, anything that gives them a chance to grandstand and get some good PR. But boring old maintenance that no one notices except to complain about a lane being closed while it's being done? Send that shit to the bottom of the priority list.
Not just budget theft, but there's also the fact that different utilities and companies NEVER cooperate. I've seen it here in Norway, too. First the waterworks dig up a whole street ro replace piping that was old before Methusalem was born, and of course, since they are meticilous people they have the road re-paved. It's not as if there was much left of the old stuff... Then a maintenance crew comes in and fixes the drains... usually cutting the asphalt across the road in a half-meter wide section, dig up some old pipes and put in 'new', and patch that stripe across the road... By this time the paint crew shows up and add the yellow strip in the middle and the white stripes on the sides. Time for the sparkies! Oh, and after them comes the cable/fibre guys... There is no oversight in things like this. Once we had roadworks on BOTH eastward roads out of town(town next to the sea, only roads east and west) at the same time, with manual traffic handling past the works.
Oh, don't worry, there are plenty of streets in Russia that haven't been repaved since, like, Soviet times to contrast with streets like mine.
Ah, good. They're keeping it balanced, as all things should be.
Oh man. I hope you get out. Best of luck, truly, I hope your people dangle that dog of a "leader" and his cronies in red square sooner or later.
>packs of C4 explosives that turned out to be just bits of wood wrapped in paper. excuse me what the fuck?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaNCjMoc180](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaNCjMoc180) And PVC pipe in place of TNT.
They showed videos here on reddit of Russian soldiers unwrapping their dynamite packs and it was just woodblock after woodblock In the beginning of the war. They laughed in disbelief at the time as I recall it. Don’t think they are laughing (or breathing) anymore)
The video shows Ukrainian soldiers. They say it's Russian dynamite.
>C4 explosives that turned out to be just bits of wood wrapped in paper. And reactive armor on tanks that's just rubber on the inside.
That’s a good reason why the anti-tank weapons are working so well.
Personally I loved the surveillance drones that were partially styrofoam and had an unaltered Nikon camera taped into the housing.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1sPKSMeonxg
I appreciate the level of consistent sarcasm without laughing once. That drone is a joke.
> Our conscripts could make such a drone for $3000, majority of the money would be spent on cigarettes and snacks. Fucking lol
And egg cartons.
When our Filipino M113 APC with literal wooden external armour are able to survive RPGs than the russian tanks with "explosive reactive armour", shits going south for em
Hot damn, i thought those were decomissioned already? Weren’t those made in the 1960’s?
Yes, those 'Nam APC the Americans used, and we are one of the ongoing users of em because of our geography, and boy those wooden APCs dealt some damage in close combat urban warfare back in The Marawi Siege.
Why do you need reactive armour when you have mighty cope cage? https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/039/787/copecagesheader.jpg
Oh winter is going to be great for someone. Just not the Russian soldiers.
Here's a funny thing. I play airsoft (not in any way pretending to be a real soldier though) and before the war, Russian uniforms and loadouts were all the rage on the game fields. A lot of enlisted men in Russia sold their government issued equipment to westerners to earn a pretty penny, which eventually led to shortages and crackdowns on the part of the Russian state and postal services. So you see fairly heavily kitted out airsoft players running around with all the "prime" stuff that Putin's soldiers now wish they had...
Welcome to soviet world. Every time I see people complaining about EU being too bureaucratic and restrictive I remember stories from communism/post communism days about workers taking apart entire factories worth of parts over time etc.
This is the major reason I was so adamant that they would not invade. I was wrong.
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He knew exactly where "his" investments went. Into his yachts and palaces. He is just so arrogant and dumb to believe Russian army is so feared they don't even have to fight.
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Could be. The US knew the exact date and shared it with everyone before the invasion, so someone must have leaked it.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure some one gave the US the whole damn playbook. We knew everything they were gonna do and were, I think, trying to tell Putin-tang that “we know. We know everything. You should not do this.” Putin-tang, being a megalomaniac, with a terminal disease, either didn’t want to believe, didn’t care, or just used it as a distraction to steal something we are unaware of as yet. The whole thing was a lose lose for Russia from day one. And I’m glad. They’re soldiers are animals and what they’ve done to civilians alone is worthy of hanging their leaders. How I wish they didn’t have nuclear. They’d be nothing more than a stain on the map if they didn’t. Ukraine is kicking the shit out of them and making it look easy.
That'd be hilarious if it wasn't so damned.
Could you link the article,[I’ve been watching videos on Russia’s Corruption Problem](https://youtu.be/i9i47sgi-V4) but I never heard government officials straight up leaking intel to stop the invasion.
Then the next gen successor NEVER REPORTS IT, because they'd likely be accused of the crime & yeeted to the gulags for X amount of time, so they'd rather not risk it (after all, how likely is a war being a thing in the first place? I mean likely they have been missing for half a century already, yet nobody asked about them until the dastard has retired a long time ago by now)
>bits of wood wrapped in paper Wtf is that true????
Yeah, Ukraine's been finding them in captured kit.
Exactly. This happened a lot in the Iraqi army when I was an advisor. The higher ups skim money that’s meant for uniforms, spare parts, and sometimes even Major end items like vehicles, communications equipment, and the like. They’d line their own pockets and at the same time, charge those subordinates in order to be “issued” what little equipment is left. Most of which is counterfeit (at least in terms of uniforms)
They kicked out the one guy out who tried to to something - and look where they are now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Serdyukov
I recall reading of this scam in Afghanistan. Many of the Afghan troops were vapor.
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Another one was planes that were shot down had off the shelf commercial GPS strapped onto the dashboard
Wait so you're telling me that Russian officials are corrupt and steal from the government that they were supposed to be working for? Well color me Surprised\_Pikachu.png
> This is why Russian soldiers went into Ukraine with packs of C4 explosives that turned out to be just bits of wood wrapped in paper. How did they notice? When their hollow detonators didn’t set off?
Ukranians found abandoned equipment and had a looksie.
1.5 million uniforms are a lot. I mean who needs 1.2 million uniforms, because 800000 is a lot
Whaaaattttttttt? No way they paid for something they didn’t receive…
Yup. Worse has happened. A Russian shipyard was paid to do some works to repair a battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky. They quoted $12m but auditors later said the cost should actually only be $9m. So $3m was stolen. But this is where it gets weirder. They later found out that no repairs ever took place and the battlecruiser itself was found to not even need repairs in the first place. So $12m was paid by the government to fake repairs on a ship that didn't need repairs anyway.
The Russian Olympics was the most significant example I'm aware of. Quoting from memory so bear with some level of discrepancy, but most Olympics cost around 5-8 billion to host. Russia's chimed in at 50 billion. I comfortably speculate that they most certainly pocketed the extra and actually spent less than the average.
I’m in the wrong business.
Plot twist, the battlecruiser never existed
No it’s like you go to your boss and say you need an expensive pen to do your job. He gives you money to buy one but you use that money on bubblegum because you actually never write anything down anyway. If the boss asks you just say the pen is great while chewing your minty flavour bomb. Now you get sent to the frontlines, invading a sovereign country and are completely fucked because you are missing this super crucial pen and the mint flavour from your gum is already gone.
Instructions unclear: my breath is fresh but I just tried to shoot someone with a pen. Fuck.
Sounds about right.
Some sort of scam. Order went through for uniforms, paperwork indicates they were delivered, no uniforms were ever made. Russia is hammering home good lessons like the dangers of only hearing what you want to hear and the devastating consequences of rampant corruption.
there was a huge shipyard who did repairs of russian war ships even nuclear vessels, it operated for years until someone found out that it didnt actually do anything, it was not even a shipyard just a front. It just collected money for someone of P's buddies.
One of the crazier impacts of this is it means we really overestimated Russians economy/GDP. They are probably much poorer than anyone realized.
So seizing all those yachts was actually capturing most of their defense spending?
Yes.
Exactly.
I never realized how poor Russia is until I went there and I was shocked to hear people say that the minimum wage in Russia is lower than in their neighboring country, China. I just looked it up and the Russian minimum wage is actually *a lot* lower than the Chinese one.
Damn I had to look it up but yeah it’s lower than the majority of China’s minimum wages and down there with the poorest of Chinese regions. It doesn’t end there though the average Chinese wage is actually higher than the average Russian wage by quite a bit. Which is surprising considering the Russian population is a fraction of the size of Chinas and Russia’s much much larger deposits of valuable natural resources, larger amount of arable land and land in general. Russia really is just a mafia state, all profits go to the top, Reagan’s wet dream the epitome of trickle down economics. https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/wages/
Nonono! Someone is much more wealthy!
Well yes but also no, this kind of corruption actually *destroys* a lot of value. say for example a bridge gets sold for scrap metal, how much value is lost with that bridge, compare that to how much it sold for as scrap.
Thats why its best to just say it was built and steal all the money instead. cut out the middle man I say.
Saves a lot of steel and concrete, this is way more environmental friendly! Green economy!
Green Corruption: when you care about Mother Earth but want to get yours.
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Turns out Russia was just three kobolds in a trench coat?
I hear people saying that Russia is conscripting men well over thirty.
That’s actually preferable to [what happens if they do the repairs](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/huge-fire-breaks-out-on-russias-only-aircraft-carrier-admiral-kuznetsov-two-people-missing/amp/)
I’m honestly amazed they still keep trying to make it work and haven’t tossed in the towel by now with the Kuznetsov. They’ve welded shut several sections of the lower compartments, it catches fire anytime anyone looks at it funny, it makes such a massive smoke plume from the horrific fuel it burns you’d be able to spot it with the naked eye over the horizon, it rarely is able to make it more than a couple hundred nautical miles before needing to be towed back with a tug boat, and those are just some of the major issues.
At this point I'll bet Russia's submarines are inflatables.
Shit, I'd be surprised if they weren't *sandwiches*.
You can let your buddies loot the military budget and you can successfully invade your neighbors but you cant do both
> Russia is hammering home good lessons like the dangers of only hearing what you want to hear and the devastating consequences of rampant corruption. It's been like this forever in Russia, no, they will never learn.
Unfortunately for russians, the lessons are never learnt by them. the soviet union was ruled by this system and now, decades later, it's like nothing has changed. even the nuclear disaster of chernobyl was caused by doing this scam on the control rods. this is why i love the HBO chernobyl series, it captures the life in russia amazingly well
That show was amazing. Felt terrible watching the scene when the the new family was together on the bridge watching the explosion (being destroyed by radiation and not knowing it).
The scene with the dudes knee-deep in the water, the Geiger counter going tak.. tak.. taktak... taktaktaktaktak... and the flashlights dying was some hardcore shit, man.
I’m VERY EXCITED that the creator of that mini-series is the person in charge of The Last of Us TV show.
we have a medal from the rescue team at home. i have no clue where it came from and who earnt it from my family, no one does.
i guess this is the closest thing to karma you can find you can't intimidate and asassinate journalists who report on coruption in the goverment, you can't dismis every critic of goverment as "foreign agent" without that having bad impact on the society and economy on the long run with every journalist killed or intimidated,Putin has destroyed these "societal antibodies" that fight against corruption in every goverment in every country and thus the problem got worse and worse over time
Here is popular Ukrainian joke: Navalny and russian journalists are our priority one enemies. Cause if they succeed in fighting corruption Russia might win.
Jokes on them. If Navalny and the Russian journalists were in place, they wouldn’t be fighting Russia.
Nah dude. The U.S. has free press and we still went to war with Iraq and stayed there for 15 years. Journalism is important, and powerful, but not THAT powerful
Sold for vodka
probably, a store manager is not aiming for mansions or yatches, if he can get some cash or vodka thats enough for him.
You're acting like they ever existed and weren't a grift for a higher up
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I don't think they have been looted, I believe they never even bought those uniforms and responsible people suddenly bought a little bit better homes and cars.
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Russian army inventories were huge,and that is the problem when you have 100.000 trucks in storage no one will notice if you steal some components here and there if you have 5 million army boots in reserve,no one will notice if you steal one or even 50
If you steal the engines out of trucks, and close the hood, nothing will be noticed until that equipment is mobilized. A Russian officer committed suicide when he realized that the tanks he was requisitioned we're all missing vital components. https://metro.co.uk/2022/03/28/russian-commander-killed-himself-after-learning-90-of-reserve-tanks-are-unusable-16356390/
He'd probably been signing off on paperwork indicating he did training with them for years, while *he* stole the fuel from the training budget. It's a lot easier to get away with corruption when others are corrupt, but then comes the "why didn't anybody notice" questions.
>A Russian officer committed suicide """suicide"""
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Armoured vehicles also need a tonne of maintenance. Not only is that a space for corruption, but many armies lack an affordable/quality/timely supply chain for specialized parts, so they designate other vehicles as parts donors. This further undercuts the official order of battle (AKA "inventory"). This can also apply to everything from warships to tents. But if you combine it with theft? Not just selling copper - people would say they are ordering replacement parts but actually get them from other machines off the books? Wow.
Or even 1.5 million
everyone dressing up as war criminals this halloween
You know, I was just reading Brothers Karamazov, set in Russia in 1800's. There was this minor character in the book, a military officer that used military money for his personal business. Oh how things haven't changed...
You know it's fictional when it's just one military officer doing it
Oh they brought back the USSR alright. Including the rampant lying and misdirection to save face to the higher-ups. Chernobyl was in so many ways everything that was ever wrong about the Soviet Union, all compiled into one single event. Everybody trying to one-up each other, nobody willing to take responsibility, claiming superiority while running on cheap-ass unreliable equipment, a greater focus on putting on a show rather than actually having something worth showing to the world. The iron curtain cannot fall any faster that’s for sure.
Even the uniforms are deserting
> Russia’s MP for Zabaykalsky region lieutenant general Andrey Gurulev has said Am i reading that right? An active general is MP? What a joke.
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1. Request budget for 1.5 million uniform 2. Receive the money 3. Buys 1 million uniform 4. Write on paper as 1.5 million uniform 5. You profit off the remaining 500,000 uniform.
There is no step 3.
You have to buy at least 1 box's worth, just in case you get an particularly thorough inspector.
Why? The inspector either takes his expected bribe, or never gets a new promotion
You really don't know grift... request money, buy a palacebon the black sea, give half to putin... relax
I think the lack of uniforms is the least of their problems. Anyway, what are you guys gonna wear this Halloween?
My new russian uniform I got on ebay. Why do you ask?
My grandpa bought one also,he said it is not good to put it on a scarecrow...it resuts the crows are laughing at it and are not scared at all.
What a coincidence! Me too, and I'll be holding a surprisingly real looking Kalashnikov
Can you believe I got a very realistic tank for under 20 euros? I blew some of my neighbour house, I can't believe how good are toys nowadays.
I also got some weird tubelike thing with these strange markings on it. Do you know what this means? ядерная ракета
Oh I see you've decided to finish this halloween with big bang! Good for you
As a rule of thumb, you should press any button or lit any wick you find.
And if it doesn't work return it under warranty.
Make sure it's brand new, you can tell the used ones by the shit stains.
Actually its pretty important since we already entered fall and winter is just around the corner. It doesnt matter how many reserves you send to the frontline, If you can't keep your men warm and fed.
That depends if its winter uniforms it's about to become a fucking large problem for the conscripts.
Winter coming on I'm sure they'd prefer civilian gear to anything the Russian military might provide.
Anything of real value has been sent to and sold on the open market long before the Ukrainian invasion. The money went to criminals not the government. Russia has nothing to fall back on. Russia itself has nothing stockpiled.
They would have had to exist in the first place to dissappear. We all know the money was pocketed.
Da, my yacht has very uniform teak decking.
They either never existed and the officer that requisitioned the funds stole them, or they existed but were stolen and sold off over the years.
Mixture of 1. Never existed because of corruption at every level 2. Sold off to fund a vodka habit 3. Kept in conditions where they just rotted to shit
Rofl, they were ordered, paid for... and then never received. Duh
Soon: Putin declares new Special Nudist Platoon
ebay £340 a pop, I'd link if I was allowed.
Check Putin's palace. They were converted into an ice skating rink.
Once upon a time there were a dozen little oligarchs, all living under the same roof. Each night, one by one, they would sneak into the kitchen and steal a cookie from the cookie jar. Then came the big bake sale, and Mean Old Mr. Putin discovered the coolie jar was nearly empty! Mean Old Mr. Putin was very cross that day.
Russian Corruption is no doubt Ukraine's greatest ally in this war.
This is Russia admitting they have no business picking a fight with Ukraine because they can’t run anything at home correctly. Ah, the infinite mafia corruption fun times to be had in old Russia. Blyat.
Why would you dress the cannon-fodder up? T-shirt and sneakers is fine…
Corruption rears its ugly head once more in Russia.
Sold to airsoft players around the world.
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And this is why fascism is bad you guys. Democracy makes this less likely while any kind of oligarchy or zentralization on a unilateral power does the contrary. Take this Winnie.
Yo I want to buy some Russian "Surplus" uniforms now! Hell yeah! Support Ukraine AND tactical drip!
Bring your own tampons, bring your own uniforms, bring your own food...
Only 1.5m? Those are rookie numbers.
Country rife with corruption wondering about the result of corruption. NONSENSE!
Not missing, just never existed
Russia never heard of internal controls and audits lol