July 10, 2026: The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was supposed to be over in a few weeks but lasted longer than the Russian World War II effort to defeat the Nazis. That victory was achieved because Russia built more tanks, armed more men, and put more warplanes in the air than the Germans. American Lend-Lease aid provided many essential items Russia lacked, and the Americans kept delivering that until the Japanese were defeated, three months after the Germans surrendered.

Compared to that victory, the current war is a dismal, disillusioning, and very expensive defeat made possible by epic amounts of corruption among Russian generals and everyone down to new recruits. Government officials were even more corrupt, because they could commit their crimes without worrying about death by drone. Putin was told by his military advisers that the Ukraine Special Operation would be over in a few weeks. Putin’s associates thought this was what their boss wanted to hear and the few advisors who knew better just kept quiet.

Russia began the war with the second-most-powerful armed force on the planet. As of mid-2026, it is still, on paper, the second most powerful, after America's military power. That’s because the 1.4 million casualties suffered in Ukraine, along with 14,000 armored vehicles, 20 percent of which were modern tanks, were tolerable. There were similar losses in artillery, air defense, and electronic warfare equipment. Russia has enormous military reserves of equipment and manpower. While Ukraine's losses were so debilitating that Russia had to bring 1960s-vintage tanks out of storage, Russia still has a lot of military material in storage and lots of manpower to mobilize. To placate the essential and influential city dwellers, Russia did not recruit men from major cities for the war in Ukraine. New recruits, both volunteers, conscripts, and men grabbed off the streets, came from rural areas and prisons.

Russians living in the exempted cities did not notice the war until recently, when Ukrainian drones regularly attacked Russian cities. To many residents, this was their first indication that the war was not going well for the Mighty Russian Military. Now they have to process the new information that Russian forces are being driven out of Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are about to regain the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia has held onto for twelve years. Worse, the Ukrainians will not, as had been the case in 2014, lease the port of Sevastopol and other smaller facilities to the Russian Navy. Ukrainian aerial and naval drones now dominate the Black Sea, including the waters surrounding the peninsula. Russian commercial shipping will use the Black Sea only if Ukraine allows it.

The current problems are nothing new. Fourteen years ago, Russian military prosecutors found that about 20 percent of Russian defense spending was stolen by corrupt officers and officials. That there is corruption in the Russian military is no secret. Officers, including generals and admirals, have been prosecuted frequently for decades and that continues into 2026.

But a comprehensive investigation revealed that the extent of the thievery was greater than anyone could have imagined. This discovery is all part of a decades-long trend. In that time, the Russian government has been relentless in its campaign against corruption. Progress is slow, but every year more people are prosecuted and more corrupt practices publicized.

The anti-corruption campaign in the military had been going on for several years. A large part of the effort is directed at firms that manufacture weapons. These companies refused to justify their wildly gyrating prices. Recently, this led to a curious confrontation in which Russian shipyards refused to build submarines for the Russian Navy. This was caused by government efforts to rein in rapidly rising prices and eliminate corruption. All this put the Defense Ministry in a difficult position.

The Russian Defense Minister was caught between conflicting orders. The Russian President was trying to reduce corruption in the military and had ordered the defense minister to do so. But in doing that, he withheld payment to many military suppliers because these firms refused to explain why prices had suddenly increased. That created problems with the President, who is also demanding that defense industries produce the agreed-upon quantities of weapons by the promised delivery dates. That did not happen as long as the defense minister was putting contracts on hold to deal with corrupt practices. President Medvedev ultimately backed whatever the defense minister wanted, which led submarine builders to threaten to shut down operations. All this accelerated corruption investigations and led to lower prices. But production was disrupted.

Aircraft and missile manufacturers were the first to agree to lower their prices, but the submarine builders claimed they could not control their own rising costs. The government believed the higher costs resulted from inefficiency and mismanagement, as well as from antiquated shipbuilding facilities. This situation was unique to Russian shipbuilding, which never, like many other Russian manufacturing industries, tried to achieve world standards of efficiency and technology. The Russian shipyards were in such bad shape that the government authorized the purchase of a new Mistral-class amphibious ship from France, as well as the manufacturing technology to build more Mistrals in Russia.

But backwardness does not explain all of Russia's shipbuilding problems; there is still a lot of corruption, and both problems have to be fixed before the Russian Navy can get affordable, effective warships from Russian yards. That's going to take a decade or more, and in 2026 it is still a work in progress.