Your sources confirm that corruption is a problem, and it’s plausible that corruption is a factor in how poorly the war has gone (which I note is the strongest claim, i.e. “plausible”, in the Politico article), but your original claim, in the context of the OP you responded to, seemed to be that underestimation of corruption is [a huge part of? perhaps a majority of?] what caused everyone to be mistaken about Russian military power, and I definitely don’t think these sources add up to that conclusion. 7 billion rubles of corruption in the military (Moscow Times article) is a drop in the bucket compared to a total budget of at least 2.5 trillion rubles, even if the corruption estimate is off by an order of magnitude.
The real corruption is and will always be maze-like behavior, not some guy embezzling a few billion dollars. Taxes we mortals can handle, mazes we cannot.
I thought it was all over the internet? And has been known for years if not decades, just not how deeply it affects the fight readiness.
https://twitter.com/andreivkozyrev/status/1500611398245634050
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-military-corruption-quagmire/
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/03/21/corruption-in-russias-military-quadrupled-in-2018-prosecutors-say-a64907
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095327X06294622
https://www.ffi.no/en/publications-archive/russian-military-corruption-scale-and-causes
Your sources confirm that corruption is a problem, and it’s plausible that corruption is a factor in how poorly the war has gone (which I note is the strongest claim, i.e. “plausible”, in the Politico article), but your original claim, in the context of the OP you responded to, seemed to be that underestimation of corruption is [a huge part of? perhaps a majority of?] what caused everyone to be mistaken about Russian military power, and I definitely don’t think these sources add up to that conclusion. 7 billion rubles of corruption in the military (Moscow Times article) is a drop in the bucket compared to a total budget of at least 2.5 trillion rubles, even if the corruption estimate is off by an order of magnitude.
The real corruption is and will always be maze-like behavior, not some guy embezzling a few billion dollars. Taxes we mortals can handle, mazes we cannot.