Related to my observation: The Russian Way of War

“The arming and equipment of the soldiers does not correspond to contemporary standards. They do not have the arms, the protection, or the communications” that modern armies do. “Nothing has changed in principle.” Russia doesn’t produce “contemporary rifles or normal bullets, or artillery shells” and consequently “shoots with the old ones.”

“There are no sniper rifles and no snipers,” he continues. “There is a clutch of specialists in the FSB who have foreign arms and bullets. Russian tanks are antiquated and poorly armed, and they are “willingly purchased only by those countries which do not have any problems with their birthrates.”

Russian aviation, Felgengauer continues, “cannot effectively support ground forces, in any case, at night or in bad weather.” Russian avionics are antiquated. And radars of the most advanced kind are produced only in the US. “We used to purchase them, but we can’t get them anymore.” Russia can’t produce equivalents.” And it lacks the GPS guidance systems that make modern armies so effective.

All this means, he concludes, that Russia’s armed forces currently “are at the level of Pakistan’s. Of course, [Russia] has nuclear weapons, rockets, and submarines,” although “how many of them really are suitable for use in the event of a nuclear war, no one knows for certain or will specially seek to find out.”

Changing that, Felgengauer says, will not be easy because “all serious modernizations in Russian history have relied on Western technology,” and now it is going to be more difficult to gain access to it.