Russia sought to create a leaner, meaner military. But entrenched, Soviet-era practices endure.

Army vehicles were so decrepit that repair crews were stationed roughly every 15 miles. Some officers were so out of shape that the military budgeted $1.5 million to re-size uniforms.

That was the Russian military more than a decade ago when the country invaded Georgia, according to the defense minister at the time. The shortcomings, big and small, were glaring enough that the Kremlin announced a complete overhaul of the military to build a leaner, more flexible, professional force.

But now, almost three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is clear the Kremlin fell woefully short of creating an effective fighting machine. Russian forces in Ukraine have underperformed to a degree that has surprised most Western analysts, raising the prospect that President Vladimir V. Putin’s military operation could end in a resounding failure.

By any measure, despite capturing territory in the south and east, the Russian military has suffered a major blow in Ukraine. It has been forced to abandon what it expected would be a blitzkrieg to seize the entire country in a few days. Its forces were driven from around Kyiv, the capital. The flagship of its Black Sea fleet, the Moskva, was sunk; it has never controlled the skies; and by some Western estimates, tens of thousands of Russians have died.

To Russia’s detriment, much of the military culture and learned behavior of the Soviet era has repeated itself in this war: inflexibility in command structure, corruption in military spending and, perhaps most damningly, the longstanding practice of telling government leaders what they want to hear.

The signs of trouble were hiding in plain sight. Just last summer, Russia held war games that the Ministry of Defense said demonstrated its ability to coordinate a deployment of 200,000 men from different branches of the military in a mock effort to combat NATO. They would be among the largest military exercises ever, it said.

Lt. General Yunus-Bek Evkunov, the deputy defense minister, told reporters the exercises demonstrated Russia’s ability to rapidly deploy joint forces in a manner that would “make sober any enemy.’’

The whole exercise was scripted. There was no opposing force; the main units involved had practiced their choreography for months; and each exercise started and stopped at a fixed time. Also, the number of troops participating was probably half the number advertised, analysts said.

“It is the Soviet army, basically,” said Kamil Galeev, an independent Russian analyst and former fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington. “The reforms increased the efficiency of the army, but they only went halfway.”

When, after the Georgia conflict in 2008, Russia tried to revamp its military, the idea was to jettison the rigidly centralized, Soviet-era army that could supposedly muster four million troops in no time. Instead, field officers would get more responsibility, units would learn to synchronize their skills and the entire arsenal would be dragged into the computer age.

But many traditionalists resisted change, preferring the old model of a huge, concentrated force. Other factors also contributed to the military’s inability to adapt to new times. Birthrates plunged in the 1990s, leading to a shrinking pool of men and delaying recruitment targets. Low salaries didn’t help. Endemic corruption handicapped reform efforts.

The basic problem was that the military culture of the Soviet Union endured, despite the lack of men and means to sustain it, analysts said.

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