Putin's tactical techniques are a joke: no one knows what is the point of his attacks and his soldiers are dying like flies
Quote:Putin’s new Russian empire is a farce, albeit a nightmarishly bloody one. And his Victory Day offensive is a farce, too. Less than two weeks after the first Russian platoons marched across Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, just north of Kharkiv, the Russian operation has ground to a halt after just a few miles.
Even worse for the nearly 500,000-person Russian army of occupation in Russia, the northern offensive has overextended Russian logistics and armor support and forced unprotected infantry to attack on foot. The Russian casualty rate was high before Victory Day. Now it’s catastrophically high as Ukrainian mechanized brigades reinforce the northern front.
It’s even possible the Russians suffered their bloodiest day of the 27-month wider war as the northern offensive culminated. There were a record 1,740 Russian casualties on May 12, according to the Ukrainian defence ministry. That’s hundreds more daily casualties than the Russians suffered in previous weeks.
No one outside of the Kremlin knows what the offensive’s actual military objectives were supposed to be. But in strictly military terms, the offensive almost certainly wasn’t worth it. Not only did the Russians fail to gain control of any important terrain, they also squandered offensive firepower that might have made more of a difference elsewhere along the 700-mile front line.
The offensive, just like the whole wider war, is political theatre. And in theatre, appearances are more important than reality. All Putin has to do to make his theatrical offensive successful, for the audience that truly matters to him – his regime and its supplicants among everyday Russians – is for Putin to redefine what “successful” means, and declare victory.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05...-brigades/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
