The internal dynamics of different nations is always interesting to me. My understanding was that in Iran top leadership wanted to maintain the lie but there was a lot of resistance within the government, so much so they chose to admit it.
Iran is governed by factions that are occasionally aligned, but can have divergent interests. It’s very hard to understand recent Iranian history if one assumes that a single political entity is in control. I mean, Khamenei is nominally in control, but it’s not always that tight.
Russia is very different: Putin clearly has absolute control over all government entities.
> Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption would have been allowed to destroy their military equipment.
I wasn’t precise enough. He does not control every individual specifically, just all organisations (as in, there is none that dares to contradict him, and the people in charge who do, don’t do it for long).
That’s a consequence of the power structure. It is optimised to avoid factions and keeping dissenting voices under control, but micromanagement has its limits. To some extent, corruption also helps in several ways at the highest levels. This seems to be one of the reasons why they cannot stop it. It enables selective enforcement, and is an effective tool to get rid of people who get too powerful, too independent, or not obedient enough (there are many examples of this in the last couple of years: when Putin wants to reshuffle the government he finds corruption charges). It seems that this culture spread down the ranks and pervades the whole state.
> I’m surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at all.
If anything, a civilian aircraft is a sitting duck for anti-aircraft missiles: it has no decoys, no flares, no jamming or any kind of countermeasures. Surely, not shooting it down when firing at it takes some effort. Also, we don’t know how many missiles were fired.
