Ask Your Question today
I keep hearing the term cannon fodder when describing Russian soldiers being told they were going to training and what not. It almost appears that the Russia military attempted to soley get these Russian soldiers killed. How does that benefit them? It does not make sense to me. Some videos I've seen they were not even given weapons.
I think there are two basic ways you can start to try to explain why any horrible thing has happened: it's because someone (or many people) deliberately set out to make that horrible thing happen, or it's because someone (or many people) screwed up, possibly in many ways.
To be as charitable as I can manage, I think this aspect of the Russian attack comes under the screw-up heading.
It does seem that Putin was convinced that the Ukrainians would all drop their weapons and run away the moment Russian bombs began falling on Ukraine and the Russian army rolled over the border. And the way Putin has worked very hard to arrange things in Russia over the last couple of decades meant that nobody dared to tell him that he just might be wrong on that little point. This is how autocrats almost always fail: once they've got power, their main focus is on accumulating even more and making sure that nobody ever gets into a position to take it away. They surround themselves with a little clique of loyal yes-men whose only real talent is telling them what they want to hear, and they gradually fall into a delusional mindset where they're absolutely certain the world is what they want it to be rather than what an objective assessment of facts would indicate that it actually is.
What's truly ironic is that there are such clear parallels between what Putin has done and how Hitler insisted the invasion of the USSR should be handled in WWII. Hitler was absolutely certain that the Wehrmacht would completely obliterate the Soviet army in a matter of weeks and all the German planning was based on that assumption. When the Soviets started to fiercely resist after initially falling back, the German army very quickly started to have serious problems.
Although the Russians have a very long history of treating ordinary soldiers as expendable and considering their deaths to be of little consequence, I can't believe that Putin is so wicked, crazy or stupid that he actually wanted lots of Russian soldiers to die. As far as I know, the Russian Defence Ministry has made only one announcement of how many of their soldiers have died. That was around ten days after the shit-storm started, and the number was implausibly low. So it's pretty damn clear that Putin is very aware that announcing that thousands of Russian soldiers have died after just a couple of weeks of his little adventure would not go down well with the Russian public.
Even if he really doesn't give a shit about them, he does care about clinging to power, and he has to be very aware of how mass protests have brought down so many autocrats over the last couple of decades. I recently read an article where someone who was once close to Putin claimed that after Muammar Gaddafi was deposed in Libya and came to a very unpleasant end, Putin went through a phase where he obsessively watched that gruesome video of a bloody and stunned Gaddafi being hauled out of a drainage pipe, beaten up (including apparently having a knife or stick shoved up his ass), and then flung into the back of a pickup and driven off.
I've gotta wonder if Putin has occasionally rerun that video in his mind as things have fallen to shit in Ukraine, and just how far he'll go to try to make sure he doesn't suffer a similar fate.
I don’t know but I wanna be banged and used by a group of Russian soldiers or Putin