Russian military police units are fanning out in southern Russia to search for a 74-man infantry unit that has deserted en masse, highlighting the worsening crisis of the country's decaying armed forces. The soldiers broke out of their base near the southern city of Samara, apparently after fighting broke out in the garrison.

The incident comes amid fears that large sections of Russia's under-funded armed forces are on the point of disintegration. The army is struggling to cope with poorly paid, poorly fed recruits, ever-growing numbers of desertions and record outbreaks of "hazing" - the practice of soldiers shooting their officers.

"This just shows what a terrible state the armed forces are now in," said a Moscow defence analyst, Pavel Felgenhauer. "This sort of thing is happening all the time. And it's getting worse. The problem is the triple spiral of moral, ethical and technical degradation of the armed forces."

The large-scale desertion came on the same day as the discovery of two guards at a navy base in Kaliningrad found shot dead, apparently by robbers who had stolen their weapons.

Last month a conscript became so angry with fellow soldiers taunting him while they were guarding a train taking tanks to the Far East that he shot four of them dead.

Kazakhstan has meanwhile demanded an end to haphazard missile testing by the Russians after an S-300 rocket careened off course, flew over the border and hit a Kazakh village. No-one was killed by the explosion, which gouged a 14-metre wide crater, but the Kazakhs say it is the fifth such incident.

All this comes with teeth already on edge in Moscow's defence ministry as the country prepares for the raising next month of the wreck of the Kursk submarine. The vessel blew up and sank last August, apparently as a result of being loaded with cheap but volatile torpedoes.

This summer has seen explosions tear through an anti-aircraft missile battery outside Moscow and fire destroy the air force's satellite communications centre.

Almost 70 per cent of the navy's ships need major repairs and 49 of the nation's 115 air bases have no fuel for their planes. Conscripts often go unpaid for months, and officers are forced to work as taxi drivers, security guards or farmers to feed their families.

This year Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, appointed his close friend Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB colonel, as minister of defence. His main task was to cut 400,000 personnel from the 1.2 million strong armed forces. But his reforms have run into the sand in the face of official resistance. The generals, admirals and air marshals, keen to keep their departments intact, have fought against reforms and the expected cuts have not materialised.

Mr Ivanov has run up against a second obstacle - the Kremlin itself. While Mr Putin talks of the need to trim the armed forces to an affordable size, he is also insisting that Russia maintain its global role.

Thus the armed forces are committed to challenging NATO on land and sea, maintaining a nuclear strike force, deploying for a possible future war with China and a current war in Chechnya, all with a defence budget about one tenth the size of Britain's.

In Chechnya, desperate attempts to plug the gaps in trained manpower has seen units of contract soldiers hired. These troops include Russia's flotsam and jetsam, and have established a reputation for thuggery, murder, and robbery akin to that enjoyed by Britain's Black and Tans in Ireland in the 1920s.

Meanwhile, the guts of the armed forces, its sergeants corps, has disintegrated. Sergeants are no longer given proper training but are simply picked from the ablest recruits three months into the mandatory two-year term of conscription.

"There are no professional sergeants, so these units are basically kids with guns left on their own," says Mr Felgenhauer. "So you are going to have sergeants killing officers and soldiers killing sergeants. If you want to have a professional force you have to pay for it."

For NATO, there is a certain irony in all this. During the Cold War it feared attack by Russia's nuclear submarine fleet. Now it again fears that fleet, because of the risk of leaks from the nuclear reactors left on the dozens of submarines that have been left to rot.

The Kremlin might have a different worry. Its rag-tag force in Chechnya is not only incapable of beating the guerrillas in battle, but its brutality is alienating the civilians and stoking the flames of hatred to make any settlement ever harder to forge.

The Scotsman
Chris Stephen In Moscow

Source : Johnson's Russia List #5412
27 August 2001