Allan Milne Lees
1 min readFeb 17, 2020

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It’s worth noting that Russian special forces learned nothing from the Moscow debacle because Russian culture has long been one of blame rather than analysis. When something goes wrong (for example, with a space mission or a military deployment or a civil engineering project) the key thing is to determine who can be blamed. кто-то должен бйт виноват! is the standard phrase. And so lessons aren’t learned because no failure analysis is performed. Putin has been trying to remedy this, for example with explicit lessons-learned from the first invasion of Georgia, but for the most part this attitude is so deep in the culture it’s very difficult to counteract.

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.