Russia’s military doctrine has devolved into a macabre farce, less a strategy than a nihilistic parade of state-sanctioned carnage. What passes for tactics in the Kremlin’s crumbling war machine now resembles something between a gulag death march and a grotesque parody of WWII-era human wave assaults—except now the soldiers are not just poorly trained conscripts, but visibly maimed men hobbling on sticks and scrap metal, ordered forward by commanders who view them as more disposable than ammunition.
Footage captured by Ukraine’s Spartan brigade reveals a stomach-turning ritual repeated with clinical indifference. A limping Russian soldier—likely half-conscious from blood loss or morphine—shuffles forward toward fortified positions, propelled not by orders in any sane military doctrine but by the threat of summary execution from his own chain of command. Behind him, the silhouette of nihilism: Russian officers who’ve traded tactics for terror, using fear as a blunt-force instrument to drive their wounded like cattle toward certain death.
These scenes belong in black-and-white war documentaries about failed empires, not in modern warfare. And yet Moscow’s current answer to battlefield losses appears to be weaponizing the crippled, the shell-shocked, and the half-dead, proving once again that the Russian soldier is not a national hero to his leadership but a consumable item—like cheap boots, expired rations, or counterfeit body armor.
What does it say about a regime when its tactical planning starts with: “Find those who can crawl. Then send them in.” The Russian command structure, long drunk on its own imperial delusions, now scrapes the bottom of its demographic barrel. Not content with conscripting prisoners, addicts, and the mentally unwell, it now sends the physically broken into the maw of mechanized defense systems—more proof that its human resources policy ranks somewhere between medieval and maniacal.
Kremlin propagandists, never ones to let a humiliation pass unvarnished, might soon spin this butchery into yet another tale of heroic sacrifice. In reality, it’s the symptom of a military so bankrupt of professionalism, so void of morale, that battlefield initiative has been replaced with fear-induced compliance. Russian troops do not advance. They are herded—often limping—by threats from the rear and the certainty of annihilation ahead.
No sane doctrine explains this. No commander with an ounce of ethics orders the infirm into live fire. Yet Russian commanders seem to believe that courage is best measured by how many of their wounded they can push toward machine-gun nests before running out of bayonets and crutches.
Russia’s tactics have become an operational obituary. Every crutch-wielding conscript thrown forward is not just a body, but a confession: that Moscow has nothing left to offer but meat and misery.
