Comments by "Anita K" (@Anita-k) on "Wagner GOT AMBUSHED in Bakhmut. Ukraine SWITCHES TO OFFENSIVE Mode. Russians BACKSTAB THEIR OFFICERS" video.
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Just imagine being in a foreign country, where pretty much everybody can be a partisan, hence nobody can be trusted - including your own fed up "army", that partially consists of convicts, some drunks, lots of undisciplined soldiers, some more or less forcefully recruited troops from DPR/LPR and elsewhere, some disobedient mercenaries willing to leave if not paid, disinterested street-snatched mobiks (and other shadow-recruited individuals), etc, who're not trained in working together as one "army" at all and often fight with each other instead - and then this unpredictable conglomerate of people is tied down in a scorched earth region for months, surrounded by their decomposing dead; this can only be demoralizing for Russians who're used to having such a big country that most of them don't even know where their borders are, let alone why or what they're fighting for and why they're there in the 1st place.
That lack of purpose and all these months spent in ruins for nothing with no end in sight has to be soul crushing (no matter how good their propaganda is) and at some point every Russian's starting to blame Putin, Shoigu, Gerasimov, Prigozhin, their commanders, their oligarchs and wealthy, etc, way more than the Ukrainian people defending their lives and homes.
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ALL 3 OF YOU ARE RIGHT, historically "scorched earth" has usually been the defender's choice, but I had only thought about "scorched earth" in connection with this war and tbh I had neglected to look deeper into the historical context of it.
& It's always been strange to me, WHY an attacker would choose to totally destroy the country they wanna occupy, bc there's nothing left to conquer except maybe some resources - but most (if not all) infrastructure to extract and process said resources are also damaged or gone - wouldn't an attacker try to preserve as much of the occupied land as possible?
(Nope, just look at Russia's villages, rural areas, etc, they don't give af about their own land).
& I so came to the conclusion, there're several reasons for Russia to do this:
1*) To terrorize, spread fear and horror amongst the population.
2*) To intentionally wreck the country, they can't occupy or hold, not just "bc they can" and do it for revenge, but also to damage and ruin Ukraine's economy.
3*) To very cheaply rebuild the factories and settlements for optical purposes, bomb them afterwards themselves, then they claim "omg, those bad Ukrainians", (which btw also fits their propaganda narrative perfectly, like e.g. "8 years of dombing Bombas",*) and to steal the millions of Rubles cash they allegedly had spent rebuilding.**
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