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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| No Russian conscripts left in Chechnya |
| 2004-12-30 |
| There are no conscripts left in Chechnya, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said at a Monday meeting of the government. He said that contract servicemen would make 100% of Russian army personnel in Chechnya by January 1, 2005. "There will be 21,000 contract soldiers and sergeants in Chechnya," he said. Special task forces, paratrooper, railroad and construction units will be staffed with contract servicemen. Several dozens of contract servicemen are citizens of CIS member countries, and more than 200 applications from CIS citizens have been submitted for military service by contract, Ivanov said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #5 complete with mercenary bands led by businessmen-generals Bingo. I suspect that this is more the model followed by the Russians in the middle east these days. One thing we know about post-communist Russia is that the Russian government, and its security services, is completely unchecked. In the soviet era, the Party oversaw and enforced discipline among the ranks of KGB officers, colonels, technocrats, border patrols, central bankers and factory directors. Today, it's a free-for-all. The borders are a sieve. The military is completely undisciplined, corrupt, incompetent. Capital flight amounts to maybe 5% of the entire national GDP, and nearly all transactions are done in cash, which is why you see Russian men carrying little black "purses" with them everywhere. In place of a government that actually governs-- ie that has regular, standardized, disciplined operating procedures to ensure that it deliver basic public goods-- you have floating ad hoc alliances between "biznessmen" and military and FSB (successor to the KGB) officials to move valuable or sensitive goods across borders. Here's where the Iraq angle comes in. Of course Saddam was a major client of the Russians, and owed them $7B for all manner of industrial and military goods delivered and never paid for. But what's less well known is that among the OFF money-laundering centers was the Russian mafia's number one money laundering destination, Dubai. We know that millions of OFF profits were routed through front companies operating in the same place that much of Russia's illicit, and massive, natural resource and other wealth flows through. So given that background, it is completely plausible that groups of Russian individuals aligned with some combination of the security services, private businessmen, and military officers were aiding Saddam in quasi-private, quasi-governmental projects in a variety of areas, not merely economic. Among which, the movement of weapons and laboratories to neighboring countries with longstanding ties to Russian security services would surely have been a strong possibility. Think of it as yet one more botched Russian privatization. |
| Posted by: lex 2004-12-30 4:47:19 PM |
| #4 I think it's a translation thing. The Russers announced a couple years ago that they were instituting an all-volunteer force -- a professional army. They were going to have, I believe, 76th Airborne Div as the pilot, and that were going to replace the draftees in Chechnya in 2004. Guess they've done it. I hope they don't expect too much at first. It takes a while to shake down a first generation unit. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-12-30 4:33:27 PM |
| #3 Maybe we're going back to the days of Renaissance Italy (or Germany during the Thirty Years War), complete with mercenary bands led by businessmen-generals. Of course the Russians are going to have to remember that when you depend on mercenaries you risk having them turn on you. |
| Posted by: Jonathan 2004-12-30 2:16:36 PM |
| #2 That's a huge mountain for the Russian Army to climb. They're still massively corrupt, incompetent, brutal and demoralized. The Chechen kerfuffle should have been put down a decade ago. Putin's Russia is sick and rotten to the core. Its military symbolizes the complete collapse of effective state institutions in Russia. |
| Posted by: lex 2004-12-30 12:59:46 PM |
| #1 We will now see how Russian command handles a professional cadre. |
| Posted by: badanov 2004-12-30 8:25:49 AM |