War, blitzkrieg, looting, and lives in exchange for equipment: the Russian invasion from the perspective of selectorate theory

Abstract

The article presents the selectorate theory as a concept suitable for explaining the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This involved reducing a number of behavioral patterns of the Russian military and political command to typical actions of an authoritarian regime. The Russian political leadership’s reliance on a military solution to interstate conflicts and a risky blitzkrieg as the main battle plan is consistent with the logic of autocracies. They tend to make risky and ill-considered decisions primarily because the leaders of small coalition regimes do not need to be accountable to their voters. Therefore, the personal consequences of defeat are not so bad for them, unlike democratic regimes, which are critically dependent on the opinion of citizens, that’s why democratic regimes try to choose their wars more carefully, emphasizing those with the best chance to succeed. The unprofessionalism of the Russian army is revealed in the numerous – and sometimes trivial – facts of looting and robbery of civilians. For several millennia, autocracies have shown a tendency to legitimately reward their soldiers with the possibility of obtaining “trophies” of this kind. Finally, the shocking facts of the Russian military and political leadership’s disregard for the health and lives of its own soldiers, rooted even in the organizational structure of the Russian army, refer to the perverse scale of values of autocratic regimes. Its essence can be reduced to the following dichotomy: an emphasis on the primary value of weapons and equipment that can be used against the leader and thus threaten his survival, and the absence of any concern for the renewable, unorganized, and therefore non-threatening human lives of his own soldiers. It is based on the weak connection between the population and the autocrat’s focus on power, which makes it politically unreasonable to care about the equipment, health, and lives of the largest part of the (Russian) army.