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Polina Beliakova is a senior research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University.
In the first days of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s performance was notoriously — and unexpectedly — underwhelming. Russian troops were slow and disorganized and failed to establish control of any major cities.
To explain this surprising development, experts pointed out that the Kremlin had wrong assumptions about Ukraine’s willingness and ability to fight. And while that may hold true, there is another factor that might have contributed to Russia’s incorrect pre-war assessments and poor performance on the ground — systemic
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