Russian soldiers buy their own gear due to collapsing supply chains.

The war has exposed a core flaw in the Russian military: innovations occur, but nothing is institutionalized, leaving soldiers to rely on improvisation and luck. Individual units sometimes develop effective ways to defend trenches, move supplies, or counter Ukrainian drones, but these methods rarely spread beyond the unit that created them. Commanders conceal failures to avoid punishment, junior officers lack authority to implement change, and no unified digital command network exists to coordinate across brigades. As a result, frontline practices vary wildly from sector to sector, and even successful solutions are lost the moment their creators are rotated out or killed. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to standardize, scale, and automate battlefield adaptations at the institutional level. The contrast is widening the gap between an army that learns and an army that merely survives.

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