Corruption link in Russia war horror

Somewhere deep inside the initial BBI report, in a further deft sleight of hand, was a section about moral breakdown amongst our youth, and passages on how parents should teach their children morals.

It came sharply back to my mind this week as the Ukrainian President, reeling from the atrocities found in towns such as Busha after the Russian withdrawal, called out Russian mothers: “Even if you raised looters, how did they become butchers?”

It's a harsh indictment, framed to make us remember that the same soldiers who have been shooting civilians as they walk home with potatoes, are sons, and loved.

Yet the kind of excesses of theft, rape and cruelty that we are now seeing in occupied Ukrainian towns and villages has come from somewhere, and, sadly, a starting point for this moral breakdown is, most certainly, corruption.

For, it is a reality of parenting, and of leadership too, that it never works to say ‘do as I say, but not as I do’. As parents we lead by example, and as leaders too.

Thus, the actions at the top shape our entire society. In Russia’s case, the country’s leadership has been built on corruption. The journey from a salaried intelligence officer to a billionaire president doesn’t come from the administrative pay for the leadership position.

No more have the Russian oligarchs ended up with their sets of mansions across the world, yachts, and huge wealth, from CEO’s salaries, or even on legitimate investments from those salaries.

Yet what happens when leadership is built on theft is that everyone starts stealing: there isn’t a red line, beyond which everyone is honest.

You don’t get an array of super-wealthy ministers and then the heads of the army and their officers work their lives away on salaries, never pocketing a dime of all the funds they handle as administrators.

Thus, Russia’s army has suffered in the same way as our own societies — in that when we did tracking studies in Kenya and Tanzania on how much of a policy pledge and disbursements from Treasury for education and health actually ended up in schools and hospitals, the answer was very little. The majority ‘leaked’ out along the way.

In Russia’s case, that same culture of leakage has seen big defence spending, delivering a lot of rich generals, and a lot of rusty and broken tanks, undertrained soldiers, and equipment behind schedule and unavailable.

Yet the leakage has done more than that. It has undermined the entire command structure. For the non-commissioned officers, who provide the first level of leadership in every army, are corrupt too, just as their commanding officers are. They are also limited in number.

So, imagine now, your own school days, and you know that the teacher, responsible for 45 of you, is stealing from the headmaster and from your parents, will you respect him sincerely and pull out all the stops to get A grades from him for your work?

Endeavour is nulled in a situation of corruption, as is respect, and trust. So Russian NCOs hold little sway over their untrained, ill-equipped soldiers. Or maybe they ordered them to get drunk and rape, as the tales of survivors and piles of spirit bottles attest. Either way, it’s now unsurprising they didn’t advance into Kyiv, in that state.

Which may serve as a lesson to us too. Why are our own security forces so ineffective these days they cannot even clear cattle herders? Why have I turned up at police stations and found officers on duty smashed drunk and leery? How did Westgate Shopping Mall get emptied of all contents, when its few terrorists escaped, but soldiers spent days in there?

And, most of all, does our own corruption, and all the moral breakdown and collapse of authority it engenders, stop at stealing, and is it parents who can put it right?

For once a youngster learns from his own army unit that the reward for immorality is wealth, and that there is no morality in place, will it be his previous parenting that stops him falling? And will he lie and steal, but never be brutal? Those who steal and succeed, destroy everything.