By Yigal Levin
This is a very strange war, probably one of the strangest I have ever studied or witnessed.
Off the top of my head, I can name about 20 glaring oddities—both about Ukraine and Russia—that defy any reasonable explanation.
Most of these oddities will only be fully understood after the war ends, but one of them—about Russia—I will mention now.
Russia’s killed losses are approaching half a million, and perhaps by the time you read these lines they have already reached or even exceeded that threshold.
Losses can sometimes be justified if they bring dividends, but this is not the case for today’s Russia or the war it is fighting.
It is completely unclear to me why, after the failed cavalry-style assault on Kyiv, the Russian leadership decided year after year to burn its army head-on against the most heavily defended and fortified Ukrainian positions.
History has rarely seen anything like this—if it has seen it at all—when a giant army is methodically ground down year after year against a wall with minimal gains.
Some may argue that Ukrainians also attacked head-on in 2023 against heavily fortified positions.
That is true, but after that Ukrainians, having been burned, learned lessons, and later we see the Kursk operation (a shift in direction), increased use of robotics, and the search for new military solutions.
Before that there was the Kharkiv blitz, the defense of Kyiv, the liberation of Kherson through cutting supply lines and isolating forces, and much more.
As for Ukraine, there are oddities in other dimensions, but not in operational art—they demonstrated what even a cat knows: if you put your paw in the fire, you don’t do it again.
And it is not worth talking about Soviet generals—because even Soviet generals understood and were capable not only of basic military doctrine, but also of higher-level operational thinking.
But leaving those generals aside, what looks even more strange is why the army itself agrees with this.
Fine, the rank-and-file soldiers are beaten down, humiliated, and intimidated—but why junior and mid-level officers?
Do they not have questions—basic, elementary questions—that when the front spans more than 3,000 km, with directions that are either weakly defended or vulnerable, repeatedly choosing, year after year, the most heavily defended sector is, to put it mildly, a deliberate strategy of destroying your own army?
The Ukrainians have been slowly retreating over these years, methodically establishing new defensive lines while simultaneously destroying and grinding down the Russian army.
Looking at these half a million dead, one thought creeps in—the one some pro-war “Z” commentators write about: that this is not a war, it is a sacrifice.
It is indeed hard to call this a war in the true sense—because what Russia is doing is simply not how wars are fought, even if you are dealing with Soviet-style incompetence.
If a person picked up a sword and started stabbing themselves, cutting their arms and legs, you would not say: “well, he just doesn’t know how to fence—typical Soviet-style incompetence.”
A lot of lyrical commentary has been written about this, and even more “smart” arguments and attempts at rational explanations have been made, but all of that misses the point.
The Kremlin is made up of hundreds of people at the very top, and thousands in the wider apparatus; the General Staff, senior and junior officers—tens of thousands in total.
And none of them has had the basic thought that you cannot grind an army into dust and burn through hundreds of thousands of people head-on against enemy fortifications?
The only case we have seen of someone trying to leave this sacrificial meat grinder was Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner forces.
We know how that ended, but it is unclear why everyone else is fine with it.
And this is not about compassion, but simple utilitarian logic—you need an army, an economy, and equipment, especially if you have ambitions.
And Russia does have ambitions.
But Russia is racing at full speed toward a cliff and does not intend to stop, and fine, maybe the leadership is full of idiots—but why is everyone else okay with it?
History knows many wars—successful and unsuccessful, justified and unjustified, long and bloody, short and quick—but the war being waged today by the Kremlin is not just stupid, senseless, and bloody, it is also extremely strange.
