alt Hacker News>tend to prevent some of the usual corruption
not really, the corruption is quite rampant in both warring armies and especially in drone manufacturers (look up national anti-corruption invesrigation into FirePoint as an example)
war and all matters adjacent are just the perfect ground for breeding corruption as there is too much entropy and handwaving opportunity at the same time
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Covid was the same. In the UK the government created a corrupt scheme where politicians and their mates were first in the queue for personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts. Fortunes were made.
Any kind of emergency is an opportunity for graft.
P.S. Two separate enquiries found that this was fine because the corrupt scheme was fairly operated according to its corrupt terms of reference. They didn't consider whether the scheme was corrupt per se.
Whenever people talk about Ukrainian corruption, I point to three simple facts:
1. If Zelensky was corrupt, he could've easily sold out the country to either Putin or Trump, both were ready to make him a billionaire and let him keep power if he gave in to their demands. If high level generals were corrupt, Ukraine would have already lost.
2. The proof is in the pudding (battlefield results). The fact that the Ukrainian army has held back the Russian army for almost 5 years now (longer than the Soviet war with Nazi Germany in WW2) against incredible odds means that whatever they are doing is WORKING. And in 2026 the UA army is doing better than ever: has gained territory instead of losing it, and is now striking deep into the heart of Russia with impunity. A corrupt army could NEVER achieve what Ukraine has achieved.
3. The Ukrainian army has never had a high-level whistleblower defection like Prygozhin/Wagner who exposed the corruption in the Russian army.
"Handwaving opportunity". I think you hit the nail there. I will steal that. The opportunity to label critique as treason also make corruption and bad policy in general go rampant. I think that is the strongest factor.
I don't know how people can have such a romantic view. Like read some fictional books on the matter. All quiet on the Western front or Catch 22.
Back cutting and corruption goes rampant and the worst kind of people profiteer while losers are slaughtered.
NYT breathlessly reported[1] that Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to corrupt or mismanaged defense procurement in 2024. But the article never once stated the total defense budget. As best I can tell, Ukraine's defense budget in 2024 was ~$65 billion. So this supposedly pervasive corruption cost about 2% of it's budget. That's a rounding error in pervasively corrupt countries, and I'd be surprised if corruption in Russia was less than 5x or maybe even 10x than in Ukraine.
I think the chatter about corruption in Ukraine is partly a function of the fact that it's democratizing. People don't really talk much about corruption in corrupt countries, not as much as they do in less corrupt countries. Everybody knows it's there; it's a given. But without transparency and a steady flow of concrete data and admitted examples, there's not much to talk about. You just assume such-and-such was a corrupt deal. Only when a country is capable of combating corruption do you see robust, public debates about it, as you see in Ukraine.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/world/europe/ukraine-war-...