Russia and Ukraine

[Anomalocaris]

On the other hand, it gives the newer leaders a chance to do better, if their troops aren't worn out after all the combat and then redeployment.

As I said over at AD. The Russian army environment is probably the most brutal in existence. Always was, going back to imperial times. A soldier's life isn't worth shit. As is shown by the horrendous losses they sufferend in WWII.

The Red Army lost 9,7 million men on one single front. The Germans lost 5,5 million on numerous fronts. The Soviet Union or later Russia also have the highest suicide rate of all armies.

While the Russian army has never been known to be particularly sparing of soldier’s lives.  The losses suffered in WWII was created by circumstances well outside of long standing Russian willingness to accept casualties.  In WWII Russia was truly fighting for its existence, and was doing so from a position of tremendous deficit in military institutional knowledge and a very thin pipeline of skilled and experienced middle and senior level officers caused by Stalin’s purges oh the Soviet officer corp 1937-1939.

When you have yo fight or your country and ethnic group perishes, and much of your army’s senior leadership had been relatively new lieutenants, captains and majors just 2 years before,  and your country’s system of staff officer training was not particularly robust and did not particularly emphasize giving junior staff officer trainees early exposure to the skill, practice, and knowledge required for senior command, then you are left with hardly any alternatives to using lives to nullify enemy superiority in tactical skill.