Dmitryi Lysakovskiy ("Goodwin") and Sergey Gritsay ("Ernest") are now called "pioneers of aerial reconnaissance" of the "Donetsk People's Republic" who worked without rest since 2014 to create UAV battalions fighting for #Russia interests in #Ukraine. You could expect they will be respected and granted medals, instead they were sent as infantry to a certain death - and died. But before they died, they recorded a video, which perfectly describes the whole Russian political system.

In the video they accused the commander of their unit Igor Puzik ("Zloy") of blatant corruption, theft, drugs trading and ultimately disbanding their UAV unit to sell their equipment. Commander's wife was in turn engaged into "Katya-Valya" fishy "humanitarian" project where they took donations money, purchased used "Mavic" drones at the price of new and "saved" the difference. In one video Lysakovskiy openly says Russian soldiers are literally "commander's serfs" who exist exclusively "so that his reports look good in Moscow". He also called his listeners "never to go serve under MoD, especially in Donetsk". Lysakovskiy and Gritsay served a convincing example of these customs, uncritically executing their commander's order and knowing they will die for nothing.

This is very Russian attitude actually - doing something stupid, know it's stupid but still doing it because they were told so. Stupidity is not exclusive to Russian army of course, but similar cases in Ukrainian army (e.g. scandal with general Sodol) serve an example how individual soldiers' refusal to execute criminal orders and exposing them to public opinion can remove incompetent commanders. As result, overall level of incompetence and corruption is reduced, instead of accumulating.

The reaction of the general public is also interesting - in Ukraine every media wrote about the general Sodol scandal, leaving politicians no choice but to discuss it too and respond. Most Russians will never find about "Goodwin" scandal - Russian media reservedly reported "death of head of DNR air recon" and highlighted his "readiness to fulfill orders" and "high moral values", interestingly adding that in 2019 Lysakovskiy was convicted and jailed for extortion and racket just so that readers don't think too high of him.

But the most indicative is the reaction of the military media, who cannot pretend it didn't happen - they express limited outrage, while at the same time calling to "not doing your laundry in public" and "let the designated organs do their work". They never ask why these "organs" (counterintelligence and military police) never did they job before these two were killed. But that's the whole idea - pretend "steps were taken", "changes will be made"... and do nothing. This was exactly the case with past Russian army scandals - murder of Igor Mangushev "Bereg" and suicide of Andrey Morozov "Murz". Serfs complain between them, but they continue being serfs.

The most interesting social phenomenon is however, that these guys, who otherwise would be quite talented engineers and managers, pointlessly gave their life to forcibly impose exactly the same type of serfdom and abuse in another country, which fiercely resists the invasion specifically because its people don't want to become "Goodwins" and "Ernests" on another dictator's war.

This story serves yet another evidence of suicidal elements built into the Russian system. Its authoritarian governance grants it the speed and decisiveness, but also removes all safety brakes and mechanisms to remove cognitive biases from the system. Quite the opposite, bottom up delegation of responsibility results in the lower ranks universally applying popular fallacies such as "they see more from the top" (с верху виднее), which means everything that looks wrong or stupid must be a part of some smart plan whose sophistication you just don't see. This attitude results in a positive feedback loop, meaning cognitive biases are reinforced rather than cancelled out, as it's the case in governance based on transparency and evidence-based decision making.

Putin was able to make the decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 almost single-handed specifically because of this features of the Russian system. He decisively took a path which came out to be entirely wrong, yet he took it and insists on continuing it, once again because there's nobody with enough brains to tell Putin "let's stop doing it, or our country will crash once again".

Note: Russian and English subtitles are generated automatically, so they may be not 100% accurate.