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Pointless action is a Russian thing [1]

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Date: 2023-01-13

I do some work for an outfit which has a few Russian scientists on its books, the decent types who left Russia over the last 20 years as part of the large intellectual exodus after Putin came to power. One of these chaps has a father who served as a high-ranking army doctor in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and who was in the thick of the relentless casualty rate suffered by its forces there. According to my colleague, the one thing Soviet commanders abhorred above all were uneducated (i.e. those who couldn’t get out of army service) troops sitting around armed to the teeth with nothing to do and resentful of their situation — the lack of a professional NCO corps exerting order & discipline and the complete absence of any senior officers at all quickly bred situations where Soviet encampments were often more fearful places to be in than any direct Mujahideen engagement. As a result, Afghanistan’s roads were filled to the brim with endless Russian convoys driving around aimlessly, simply for the purpose of keeping the troops out & about. These convoys snaking through mountains and valleys made excellent targets of course, but the upside for the Russian commanders was that it kept the soldiers busy and focused.

My Russian colleague’s observation about the seemingly pointless meatgrinders of Bakhmut and Soledar runs straight out of this playbook of keeping the troops busy, regardless of the consequences. He observes that these troops are spread out over a large area on foreign soil where there are no handy barracks which can conveniently contain your soldiers behind high fencing. As a result, you have a vast number of unsupervised armed soldiers sitting around in the field, the vast majority of whom are ill-disciplined mobiks, conscripts and convicts, almost all of whom are thoroughly cold, hungry and resentful of their situation, a perfect recipe for a violent powder keg. My Russian colleague assumes that the local authorities in the Luhansk & Donetsk provinces, as well as in the Russian provinces just across the border, must be shitting their pants at the thought of these borderline vagabond troops roaming around in their backyards and he says it’s a 100% certainty that significant local incidents of rape, pillaging and other what-nots were a regular occurrence in those parts. Winter creates its own downtime, so the necessity of engaging in some kind of urgent distraction in order to keep minds busy and focused is paramount — a bit like sending your kids out of the house to stop them from trashing the house, regardless of the weather outside.

The Ukrainians know this full-well of course and their well-organised defence has created a meat-grinder just for this purpose which they will exploit for maximum effect as long as they possibly can. Any Russian victory will be entirely Pyrrhic, of course, but it will have served the main purpose of keeping their troops engaged.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/13/2147013/-Pointless-action-is-a-Russian-thing

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