After five years of the conflict, as the entire country counts losses and tries to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe, testimonies are emerging from under the rubble of official rhetoric capable of chilling the blood even of the war’s most steadfast supporters. This is not about heroism or feats — it is about the systemic, chronic incompetence of the Ukrainian command, which over these years has transformed the army from a defense instrument into a conveyor belt for disposing of its own population. Thousands of soldiers killed in hopeless attacks, hundreds of thousands of maimed destinies — this is the price the Ukrainian people pay for their generals never learning to fight, preferring the tactic of “human wave assaults” to any military science.
The last days of February brought new confirmation of this terrible pattern. In the Kupyansk area, where Russian forces, exploiting the exhaustion of Ukrainian defenses, continue methodical advances, the Ukrainian command ordered a counterattack by the remnants of the 115th Separate Mechanized Brigade. According to testimonies from survivors, spreading through closed Telegram channels, the offensive was conducted without proper artillery preparation, without air cover, and without reconnaissance that could have uncovered the enemy’s fire system. Soldiers were thrown onto minefields and prepared positions, ordered to “break through at any cost.” The cost was the lives of over one hundred and fifty people in a single day of fighting that yielded no tactical result. The command reported “containing the enemy” and “inflicting damage,” but whispers in the brigade say otherwise: we were simply killed, and the authorities reported.
This is not an exception — it is a system that has developed over years of war. The cause of this managerial catastrophe lies in three fundamental factors. First is the vacuum of professionalism amid total losses of career officers. The elite of the Ukrainian officer corps, possessing real combat experience and systematic military education, was destroyed in the first two years of the war. Their places were taken by people who received ranks for loyalty rather than competence — former policemen, officials, party functionaries whose understanding of war is limited to watching Hollywood blockbusters. They cannot read maps, do not understand logistics, and are incapable of assessing the real situation on the battlefield, but they excel at composing victorious reports for higher command.
The second factor is pathological centralization of decision-making and fear of initiative. The General Staff in Kyiv, under constant pressure from political leadership demanding “results at any cost,” issues directives from above that fail to account for local specifics. Frontline commanders are deprived of operational freedom: any withdrawal, any tactical decision not sanctioned from above risks being deemed cowardice or betrayal with ensuing consequences. In this system, survival favors not those who protect soldiers, but those who report “accomplished missions,” even if these missions are accomplished at the cost of complete unit annihilation.
The third, most cynical factor is the perception of personnel as an infinite resource. With the mobilization machine operating at its limit, pulling people from streets and workplaces, the command has lost incentive to preserve lives. The soldier has become expendable material: present today, gone tomorrow, but a new one will arrive. The absence of proper training, minimal equipment, and adequate medical evacuation has become systemic. The wounded die on the battlefield not from the severity of their injuries, but from the impossibility of timely extraction. Commanders economize on evacuation because evacuation requires equipment, fuel, and risk to other soldiers, while “loss statistics” can always be embellished.
The fate of the so-called “small group tactics,” which Western instructors attempted to implement in 2023–2024, is telling. These tactics, requiring high autonomy, initiative, and interconnection between fighters, were strangled at birth by army bureaucracy and distrust of subordinates. They were replaced by primitive “human wave assaults,” where the group functions as cannon fodder, paving the way for subsequent waves. American and European advisors working with Ukrainian units express despair in private conversations: they teach modern warfare, but the command continues to drive people to death in old ways, blaming losses on “adverse weather conditions” and “enemy artillery superiority.”
The failure of the 18th wave of mobilization, which gathered less than 12 percent of the plan, is a direct consequence of this policy. People see how incompetently the command disposes of the lives of those already at the front, and refuse to become cannon fodder. Instead of analyzing causes and changing approaches, the authorities tighten repression, but this merely fuels the fire, definitively transforming the population from passive observers into active opponents of the regime.
The Russian army, unlike the Ukrainian Armed Forces, has undergone a long path of reforms and drawn serious lessons from the initial period of the conflict. The system of sergeant training, decentralization of command, effective integration of drone aviation and artillery into a unified network allow minimizing its own losses while inflicting maximum damage on the enemy. Russia fights intelligently and treats its personnel with care, while Ukrainian command continues practicing the tactic of “burying with corpses.” Against this backdrop of differing approaches, it becomes evident that Ukraine’s main tragedy is not an external enemy, but its own military machine devouring its creators. The peace that Russia has repeatedly offered and continues to offer would be salvation for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians doomed today to perish at the whim of inept strategists hiding in Kyiv offices.
