“He doesn’t want to do anything that some general can take credit for as a winner,” explained war expert and RAND Corporation analyst Michal Bohnert, explaining why Vladimir Putin did not intervene more during Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region in early August and appoint a general to take command above the situation. According to him, this is a persistent error in the leadership of the Russian president.
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Ukraine launched a surprise attack on Russia’s Kursk region on August 6 and in late September said it controlled more than 1,295 square kilometers. Russia has not regained any significant piece of territory.
According to experts, Russia’s response to Ukraine’s attack was slow. Putin initially froze, as he has in other crises, but Moscow eventually put Russia’s main secret service, the FSB, in charge, which then ran other military groups as well. Military experts told Businnes Insider that it was a surprising move that showed Russia had not resolved long-standing command and control problems.
Bohnert added that these security forces are “subordinate to Putin”. The Russian president already played an unusually direct role in the conduct of the war in Ukraine and sometimes issued orders himself. In 2022, US intelligence reported that Putin was giving orders to his generals directly, causing confusion in the military leadership. This is not usually how political leaders direct military operations.
Therefore, according to the war expert, Putin’s reluctance to give orders to the generals in the Ukraine attack fits with his behavior during the invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022. “Dictators don’t like it when someone appears who looks like another strongman. the logic can be seen at the beginning of the Russian invasion. When Russia failed to quickly occupy all of Ukraine, it was forced to fight in the east instead,” he described.
He said that at the start of the invasion, several military officials were in charge of different sectors. “But there was no coordination except for Putin. People don’t realize that it was intentional. Because it’s very clear that Putin never wanted to give credit to any general for winning the war in Ukraine,” he added.
This was also confirmed by American officials of The New York Times. According to them, at the beginning of the invasion, there was no central military commander in Ukraine, and decisions came directly from Moscow. A few weeks later, Russia put General Alexander V. Dvornikov in charge of operations in Ukraine. He was removed from the post a few weeks later, with the British Ministry of Defense saying it was most likely due to the army’s “poor record”.
During the war in Ukraine, several top Russian generals were arrested on various charges, including accepting bribes. Putin’s motives for these arrests are not confirmed. However, The Moscow Times reported in May that the FSB went after the generals with the Kremlin’s approval so that they could be blamed for the poor development of the Russian invasion.
“The inability to establish an effective general for the war in Ukraine is one of Putin’s worst blunders. One of the main duties of a war leader is to select generals who can win and remove those who cannot,” wrote a historian and writer for Foreign Policy magazine last year dealing with Russian history Simon Sebag Montefiore.
He added that “Putin either never found such a talented general, or, more likely, he is so afraid of the threat of such a general that he preferred a stalemate to the danger of victory being won by someone else”.
Experts therefore say that Putin’s decisions often do not make sense from a military perspective and instead appear to be aimed at preserving his political power. “At every juncture, Putin continues to do what is politically expedient and militarily stupid, including not proceeding with another full mobilization of troops or declaring steps like martial law to deal with the response to the situation in the Kursk region,” Business described Insider George Barros, a Russia-focused analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington think tank.
According to Bohnert, this pattern can generally be observed in authoritarian regimes such as Putin’s. According to him, “it is a fact of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that as a military representative you don’t want to look too capable”. He added that “unless you’re a dictator, you always want to be average”. “This culture is a dictator’s way of preventing anyone from looking really, really capable. In this environment, you have a lot of people to blame, but no one to take credit for,” he concluded.
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