RUSSIA: President Putin is struggling to reform Russia's massive military, now a bloated caricature of its former fearsome self, writes DanielMcLaughlin in Moscow.
A few very different days in the lives of a few young Russians revealed a lot about President Vladimir Putin's drive to reform the nation last week.
On Wednesday, 22-year-old Vladimir Shumeiko, a member of the elite Kremlin Guard regiment, was found guilty of bullying and beating a fellow recruit until he slashed his wrists in a failed suicide bid.
On Thursday, a military court sentenced another young recruit, Denis Solovyov, to 20 years in jail for killing five comrades in a blaze of gunfire which he called the culmination of months of violence and abuse suffered at the hands of his fellow soldiers.
The young men whose lives changed forever last week are among thousands who suffer or commit serious crimes each year in the Russian military, a poor and bloated caricature of the once-feared Red Army which is, for some, a symbol of a Putin-led reform programme that is beginning to stagnate.
Mr Vladimir Putin came to power three years ago, claiming to have the cure for a range of malaises which his ailing predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had either ignored or encouraged - from rampant corruption to Chechen separatism, stifling bureaucracy to banking chaos.
One of his key objectives was to streamline and modernise a massive, largely conscript military, armed with ageing weapons and backed by a massive bureaucracy.
However, as with many of Mr Putin's reform plans, the assault on the military monolith has been bogged down by reactionary forces that the President is struggling to shift.
"There is no real argument, even among the military, that the situation is bad and getting worse," said an independent defence analyst, Mr Pavel Felgenhauer, "but the generals and politicians disagree totally on how and what to improve."
Mr Felgenhauer said many of Russia's top brass, even as they watched relatively small, high-tech US-led forces storm through Iraq and take Baghdad, refused to concede that Moscow had to develop a smaller, sharper, higher-quality fighting force.
"They still say they want two or three times more money to rebuild a Soviet-style military with the West and NATO as its target," he told The Irish Times. "The Kremlin may try to improve things, but without sharing a strategic objective for reform with the military, the outcome will be rather disastrous."
In his state-of-the-nation address last month, Mr Putin restated his long-held aim of making the army's combat-ready troops fully professional by 2007 and said national service should be cut to one year from two by 2008.
He also rallied his forces with a vague pledge to develop new strategic weapons.
On Thursday he sat around a table with a group of young students and answered their questions. Their day could hardly have contrasted more starkly with that of their contemporary, conscript Denis Solovyov, but it also offered a telling glimpse of Putin's Russia.
An unusually downbeat Mr Putin said the military was a long way from going fully professional and that conscription - a brutal system which Russia's better-off and better-educated try to bribe their way out of while the country's less fortunate youngsters just try to survive - would continue for years.
"I don't think the present state of the economy will allow us to fully give up conscription soon," the President told the students.
He said the issue of military reform was the cause of "less than polite" arguments between political groups and the armed forces' general staff but vowed to push through his plans to modernise the military regardless.
However, political analysts here increasingly note Mr Putin's reluctance to offend any of the groups vying for influence over key decisions and warn of growing stagnation in an administration that portrays itself as fearless and forward-thinking.
"In military, economic, social reform - on practically every issue - we see the President stop in the middle way, to try and balance the political forces at work in and around his administration," said Mr Andrei Ryabov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow.
Whether business tycoons or senior military men, Mr Putin will not risk rocking the political boat by pushing through radical and essential reforms, Mr Ryabov told The Irish Times.
"He believes he is a reformer, but he is afraid of destroying the current political stability by making changes and cannot create real reform without clashing with some of the interest groups that are close to power."
In answering the students' questions last week, Mr Putin admitted some of the shortcomings of his first term in office, which culminates in presidential elections scheduled for next March.
He said the government was "trying to do something" about reducing the bureaucracy and corruption which were strangling small businesses "but it isn't really working".
"Perhaps the wrong laws have been adopted, or something is missing, but the right laws are adopted in the right ways and they either do not work straight away or they start to work but then disappear somewhere and their effectiveness disappears," Mr Putin said.
Asked when Russia's long-neglected regions could expect improvements to decrepit housing and heating systems, Mr Putin said he could make no promises, as the nation was still trying to shake off the Soviet system of economic centralisation which was supposed to have died a decade ago.
"This will of course take time," he told the students. "I couldn't say that it will happen by a specific year. Nobody can give a precise answer to that question. It depends on the rate at which the Russian economy develops."
Mr Ryabov said growing "inertia or stagnation" in reform plans could derail that economic development during Mr Putin's predicted second term, unless he steels himself for a serious battle with powerful political, financial and military figures who want to preserve the status quo.
"Mr Putin is a reaction to the uncertainty of the Yeltsin years," Mr Ryabov said, remembering the late 1990s as a time when a sick president sacked governments every few months and disappeared to his dacha for weeks at a time, leaving Russia rudderless.
"Perhaps Putin's determination to maintain stability was needed in 2000 or 2001, but now the situation demands something else," Mr Ryabov said.
"In his next term, he will face falling oil prices and so have less money for crucial reform of the housing and energy sector, as well as the military. Then he may be forced to make the tough choices that he is postponing now."