Every piece of Russia's seeming incompetence in this war -- the bad logistics, the desertions, the poor planning -- seems to come back to the fact that the people making the plans felt ashamed of what they were doing, and knew that soldiers would feel ashamed too.
The reason they didn't tell Russian soldiers what they were doing -- leaving them confused and disorganized and demoralized -- was that they knew they were ordering them to do was bad.
Ultimately, the justice or injustice of a war's cause matters a LOT. It takes years -- or decades -- of mass indoctrination to get an army to fight wholeheartedly for a bad cause. You don't just order them to slaughter their innocent cousins and neighbors and assume they'll obey.
Modern social media may make mass indoctrination more difficult. Power has shifted from the talking heads to the masses; this makes it easier for both good and bad ideas to spread, but it also makes top-down coordination harder.
As the Ukrainians are demonstrating, people WILL still unite and fight wholeheartedly for a cause. But only if that cause has enough moral force that nearly everyone sees it as a GOOD cause.
Defending your home against unprovoked aggression is a good cause.
Defending your home against unprovoked aggression is a good cause.
Future leaders may have to be more like Zelensky -- getting down in the trenches with the regular people -- rather than Putin, haughtily issuing bad orders from thousands of miles away.
This doesn't necessarily mean that indoctrination is impossible, or that justice will now always prevail. But if it makes it just a bit harder for dictators to order mass destruction on a whim, that is a good thing.
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