Description
This paper examines how Russia’s experience in Ukraine has exposed the limits of authoritarian learning. While the Kremlin shows remarkable adaptive capacity - mobilising resources, reconfiguring industry, and reframing its war narrative - it has failed to translate adaptation into strategic learning. Drawing on theories of authoritarian learning and cognitive bias, the paper argues that Russia’s highly personalist system encourages “pathological learning.” The selective absorption of lessons that reinforce, rather than challenge, prior assumptions. Using evidence from military reorganisation, wartime economic management, and propaganda evolution, the paper shows how institutional dependence on repression and loyalty prevents feedback from battlefield realities. The result is an autocracy that learns to endure defeat but not to avoid it. By situating Russia’s wartime learning failures in broader debates on authoritarian resilience, the paper contributes to understanding how autocracies respond to crisis, and how the very mechanisms that sustain them politically can undermine their strategic effectiveness.
