Being corrupt and being digital

More processing of what is going on in this world. Despite the risk of absorbing disinformation or misinformation, I will write about something that seems to indicate why Ukraine is doing much better than expected. I certainly never thought they would do so well in holding off Russia, being such a smaller country that had already had to yield Crimea to Russia and is currently in the midst of fighting off the separatists in the east.

Based upon my reading, if the readings have been truthful, it seems to me that Ukraine is more digitally agile: they are conducting a modern-day warfare in surprising ways.

First, their president’s use of social media is very savvy. Russia is great at disinformation – I refer to the disinformation program during the 2016 Presidential election in the US – but for some reason, Zelensky is better at handling social media than Putin is. As far as I’m aware, Putin isn’t using any social media to do propaganda? Zelensky, being of a younger generation and a former actor/comedian, he has corralled social media to his advantage and brought a lot of countries to his side.

Second, there appears to be Ukrainian citizens using regular cell phone to capture atrocities or even to disburse war information. Resistance at its finest.

In the same vein, there is the use of drones to refute Russian claims that Ukrainians are the ones killing themselves. At first, I thought why in the world would Russia think anyone would believe Ukraine would kill their own citizens? But recently, a trickle of news has come out saying Russians have been bombing their own town of Klimovo and saying the Ukrainians were bombing that town. Is that true? I will have to wait and see if more news come out on that topic, but for now, it unfortunately seems plausible. The Russians’ brutal behavior in Bucha makes it all the more likely that they are bombing their own people in the propaganda war.

Another use of drones is to direct missiles to hit a naval ship, an astonishing feat.

Then there’s the hackers collective where citizens around the world aid Ukraine in the digital battle.

Even the questionable tactic of using the modern day doxxing – outing the names and addresses of the soldiers who performed the atrocities in Bucha. I’m not sure doxxing is a good thing though. I have to think a lot about that – I would need to hear the pros and cons about the use of this in war time. Definitely in peacetime, it’s a no-no.

On the Russian side, it seems to me that they are deploying just maximum cruelty to overpower the Ukrainian citizens instead of smarts. The mile long convoy of trucks sitting out on the single road to Kiev just looks like a sitting duck, waiting to be shot at. Does not look tactically smart. I’ve read that the maintenance of trucks has been neglected so the trucks break down quickly; thus, the supply lines of manpower, food, weapons, etc. are seriously compromised. So simple logistics are failing.

But probably the root cause for Russia’s dismal showing, at least as mentioned in news articles, is the corruption that routed the money intended for maintenance and weaponry to the pockets of wealthy people. So, the money went to things like yachts and mansions instead of warfare logistics. Another effect of corruption is the installation of cronies who have no business leading due to lack of skills, experience or temperament.

Corruption corrodes the quality of the service, whether in business, government or military. You want the best, especially in times of peril.

Enron had high levels of corruption that lead to bad accounting and when bad times came around, the company crashed, exposing the false accounting.

You could say the finance industry leading up to 2008 had high levels of corruption with the way they handled mortgage lending with “newfangled” derivative tools, but in reality, the finance guys were just raking in the money without considering the impact of forcing huge loans on people who would never be able to repay. That kind of corruption nearly destroyed our economy and our government had to step in to prevent Wall Street from falling off the cliff.

The latest corruption would probably be the last administration where daughter, son-in-law and other cronies obtained positions of power when maybe they shouldn’t have. I’m hoping we are cleaning out that corruption and strengthening our government so that we can fight off our enemies.