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That logic could be seen in the start of Russia’s invasion when Russia failed to quickly seize all of Ukraine and instead was forced to fight in the east, Bohnert said.
He said that at the start of the invasion, there were multiple military officials in charge of different sectors “and there was no coordination other than Putin. What people don’t realize is that was by design. Because it’s very clear Putin never wanted to give any general credit for winning the war in Ukraine.”
US officials told The New York Times that at the start of the invasion, there was no central war commander on the ground in Ukraine, and decisions were instead made from Moscow.
Weeks after the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia put Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov in charge of operations in Ukraine. He was fired from the role weeks later, with the UK Ministry of Defense saying it was highly likely because of the military’s “poor performance.”
Multiple top Russian generals have been arrested during this war on various charges, including accepting bribes.
Putin’s motives for these arrests are unconfirmed. But The Moscow Times reported in May that the FSB was going after them with the Kremlin’s approval so that blame could be assigned for Russia’s invasion going badly and to take control of the Russian army’s huge budget.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore, a historian and author on Russian history, wrote in Foreign Policy last year that “the failure to promote an effective general to fight the Ukraine war is one of Putin’s most egregious lapses. Indeed, one of the chief duties of the war leader is to select generals who can win victories and remove those who can’t.”
He added that “Putin has either never found that talented general, or more likely, so fears the threat of one that he has preferred stalemate to the peril of a victory won by someone else.”
A broken culture
Experts have said that Putin’s choices often do not make sense from a military perspective and instead seem focused on preserving his political power.
George Barros, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War think tank, told BI that “Putin at every junction now continues to do what is politically expedient and militarily stupid,” including not pursuing another full-scale mobilization of troops or declaring a move like martial law to deal with the Kursk response.
Experts in Russian politics have said that the firings of Russian officials are intended to send a message about the risks of consolidating too much power. Some told Newsweek in April that the arrest of the deputy defense minister earlier this year might have been meant as a warning to then-defense minister Sergei Shoigu about becoming too powerful.
The pattern can be seen in authoritarian regimes like Putin’s more generally, Bohnert said.
He said that for military officials, “that’s a fact of any sort of authoritarian or totalitarian regime, where you don’t want to look too capable. You always want to be mediocre if you’re not the dictator.” That culture, he said, “is a way of a dictator preventing someone from looking really, really capable.”
He said that in this environment, “you have plenty of people to blame, but no one to take credit.”