The Russian military is a mix of extreme hazing, brutalisation and promotion on the strength of hazing and brutalisation. A case of what could possibly go wrong given that if that's how they treat themselves they are hardly likely to act differently towards their opponents.
Yeah, "dedovshchina" produces incompetent, demoralised and/or pychopathyc soldiers, who could have seen that...
"insert surprised pikachu face"
I think it's easy to point to this as the reason we see human rights violations, but I think that ignores the biggest reason: war itself.
Every nation involved in war has members who engage in war crimes. Even the "good" nations. I'm sure I don't need to list the examples. It's one of the certainties in war, along with civilian suffering. War breaks people. It becomes personal. In survival mode, your focus becomes what is immediately around you. If you (general you) keep seeing your buddies getting blown to pieces, many people will completely break and lash out in horrific ways. The first casualty of war is the humanization of "the other side". Those people cease to become people. They become things. Bad things. Things that hate you and want you dead. Dehumanizing them makes it easier to kill them.
When I first joined the military, from day 1 of boot camp they stress how "the enemy" is less than human. I understand the logic behind it. In war, you don't want to hesitate, and people hesitate if they view the other person shooting at them as a human being.
This gets even more complex when you have an environment where if you don't kill those people, or blow up that building of civilians, you get shot yourself. It's really easy for people to immediately leap to "following orders isn't an excuse", but no one has actually been in a position of having a gun to your head, or being told a gun is to the head of your family if you don't.
War breaks people. I suspect if anyone decided to do the research after this war, we'd see a dramatic spike in suicides by Russian soldiers after they get back. The suicide rate among
American soldiers is exceptionally high, and we weren't engaged in what the Russian soldiers are.
I want to be very clear that I'm not making excuses or saying that they don't need to face accountability. I'm just sayings its not as simple to say "Russians are bad." I've worked with Russian soldiers before in Bosnia. None of them were like this. They were all the same as everyone else. Just like the soldiers I worked with from other nations that were also there. The horrors of war always takes its toll on humanity, and causes people to do horrific things they wouldn't have otherwise. To every side. It's one of the main reasons I'm so anti-war unless unavoidable.