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What we’ve found out in Ukraine is that much of the military spending has been siphoned off by corrupt leadership. How do we know that the same thing isn’t hap

• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > What we’ve found out in Ukraine is that much of the military spending has been siphoned off by corrupt leadership We didn’t find that out in Ukraine, we’ve known that from fairly widely circulated news, often from direct participants in the corruption (such as the people to whom essential gear was sold), consistently since at least the First Chechen War of the mid-1990s (where sales of fuel, weapons, and ammunition by Russian military personnel with custody over them to the enemy were a significant and recurring thing.) What we have learned in Ukraine is a better idea of the extent of the effect of that longstanding problem on current Russian military capacity. Now, it could be that China has a similar problem and has been better at keeping it under wraps than Russia has been for the past 30 or so years, but there is not much reason to suspect that.