For most people living in the Western world, Russia has historically been seen as a competitor, an adversary, or an angrily dissatisfied state. Whether that be the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or the modern-day Russian Federation under President Vladimir Putin, Western states have always kept a close eye on Russia, and for good reason, too. Russia is the largest nuclear power in the world, and up until the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it was considered to have the second-best military in the world. Yet in 2025, as Russian threats become increasingly erratic with nuclear threats left and right, the myth of their strength has been shattered. A force once thought to have been able to take on all of Europe now finds itself bogged down in small Ukrainian villages, where it has been for the past three years.
What happened?
I’ll start off by saying something that may seem quite obvious, but is in fact the main point of this article; if you don’t give something money and attention, it won’t be as good as you want it to be. Sounds pretty self-explanatory, right? After all, Russia has so many resources and such a large landmass that it can be economically powerful and largely self-reliant. However, the point isn’t whether or not they have the money, but whether or not the money actually gets to where it needs to go. With that in mind, Russia’s internal function, designed by President Putin himself, has been corrupted to its core and now weakens the regime rather than strengthening it.
Take Sergei Shoigu, for example, who was Russia’s Defense Minister from 2012 to 2024. He was Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man in the military, a second in command, and directed Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent War in Donbas (2014), military intervention in Syria’s civil war (2015), and full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022). In the West, however, he has become known only for his failures. Humiliated by the Ukrainians after a combination of defeats and slow progress, he was transferred to another post in 2024 after he could not gain ground, greatly angering Putin. It makes you wonder what went wrong until you realize the bigger picture. Shoigu “somehow” owns a countryside villa that he could not afford on salary alone, and his daughters also own extremely expensive real estate. Further down the chain of command, one of his assistants, a man by the name of Timur Ivanov, took bribes of over 12 million USD. Ivanov’s job was to oversee every bit of construction, production, and armament of the Russian military, yet the money he was allocated within Russia’s federal budget allowed him to buy apartments in Moscow and rent lavish yachts. In other words, the money was never put towards making modern equipment; it was instead siphoned off towards personal luxuries at the expense of Russia’s arsenal.
While Russian military failures can certainly be attributed to corruption throughout the chain of command, it isn’t just the military where this is the case. I would actually be confident in saying that the more you investigate corruption in Russia, the more you realize how it has spread throughout the state bureaucracy. It’s so widespread that the toll it takes on monetary flow starts immediately upstream where it comes from, in Russia’s largest and most profitable industry, oil and natural gas.
Russia is incredibly rich. Not the people, but the country, resource-wise. From sprawling diamond mines to extensive consumer goods factories, Russia has a wide array of raw materials to extract and industrial facilities to process them, the most valuable being the oil and natural gas fields owned and operated almost exclusively by two companies: Rosneft for Russia’s crude oil, and Gazprom for the country’s natural gas. Until very recently, Gazprom’s biggest customer was the European Union, dependent on cheap Russian gas to heat homes and provide electricity. As a state-owned corporation, President Vladimir Putin is the de facto CEO. The massive revenues that Gazprom rakes in every year sustain the Russian economy, fueling it and keeping it afloat. This money could prove incredibly useful to funding the military and the government, but most of it never gets there. Instead of paying its workers better wages, Gazprom has instead funded palaces and estates for the regime’s higher-ups, and it doesn’t stop there. Many of Gazprom’s satellite companies, along with Gazprom itself, are headed by Putin’s personal friends and Putin loyalists. It should not be surprising, then, to hear that Gazprom has repeatedly threatened gas flow interruptions as leverage to target other countries in the advance of Moscow’s interests. The orders come from Putin himself.
So, while Putin and his friends live luxurious lifestyles, Russian forces struggle against a determined Ukraine. Granted, corruption is also a major detriment to Ukraine as well, but it has not affected their war efforts or their domestic function to the same extent. Ukraine has at least taken action to reform its system to snuff out corruption, and the impacts of this can be seen on the front lines of its war with Russia. A close look at how the soldiers fight and what they fight with alone provides a good picture of what is going on behind the scenes. While the Ukrainians do indeed struggle with supply issues in the Donbas, no Ukrainian soldier has been sent into battle with a one-hundred-year-old rifle. The Ukrainians sometimes have issues keeping their tank force fully stocked with ammunition, yet, they aren’t pulling tanks from the 1960s out of museums to be used on the battlefield. It is the Russians who find themselves in these peculiar predicaments. One can only speculate that perhaps if the Russian military had the money properly allocated to them for functional weaponry, then maybe they would be performing a bit better than they are right now.
The massive presence of corruption in Russia raises questions beyond its borders. Think of other revisionist countries like China, Iran, North Korea or Venezuela, which all like to flex their power similarly to Russia. Are these states really that strong? Nobody can be certain, but there are still indicators. China has allegedly filled some of its nuclear missiles with water rather than fuel, and bribery and embezzlement are commonplace in Iran. It would not be unreasonable to assume that Russia is not the only paper tiger claiming to be stronger than it truly is. Obviously, don’t poke the bear, and take their threats seriously, but don’t assume they are invincible either. The average salary in Russia is a meagre 901 USD/month for a reason. One-fifth of their population doesn’t have indoor plumbing for a reason. Despite all the impressions of a strong state, the numbers reveal a decadent reality, where regime elites pocket the nation’s earnings, weakening their country in the process.
Edited by Clio Bailey
This is an Op-Ed article written by a Staff Writer. Catalyst is a student-led platform that fosters engagement with global issues from a learning perspective. The opinions expressed above do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication.
Oliver “Ollie” Scott-Hansen is an undergraduate student at McGill University studying history and Russian language, hailing from just outside New York City, yet maintaining similarly strong ties to his familial heritage in north and central Italy. He joined the Catalyst team in Fall 2024 as a staff writer, something he enjoys doing as a hobby as well. With a particularly vested interest in Eastern Europe, the post-USSR world, and the Russo-Ukrainian war, coupled with his various connections throughout the global international relations space, Ollie reports on issues throughout the world that mostly center around key geopolitical developments in contentious places mostly involving war/conflict, and domestic affairs within the United States. He has experience mainly reporting from Telegram, carefully analyzing the Russian Invasion of Ukraine through his updates forum there, but also spends considerable amounts of his free time glued to maps and statistics trying to make sense of the crazy world that surrounds our day-to-day lives.