Reminds me of the road in Endgame: Road To Salvation

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1264920/Endgame_Road_To_Salvation/

On a serious note I am sure a lot of russians who died there were clueless, desperate and maybe not even russian, maybe they didn't even sign up to be soldiers....

I don't say this to center russians or russia here, russia could have stopped this war at any point up until now and anybody who signs up to work in russia should know what they are getting into.

I make this point to emphasize how pointless, futile, cruel and wasteful this is. Not only is russia's cause here wrong, they can never win like this, not even if every dice roll comes up lucky for them for the next six months straight.

Further, and this is something I don't think is being talked about anywhere near enough, while the widespread use of FPV drones has allowed Ukraine to turn the tide of history insofar as the global elite assumed it would go on both sides, it has done so through placing an immense burden of trauma on Ukrainian FPV operators who have repeatedly had to kill human beings while seeing the violence up close and personal.

This is the scene of some true pointless cosmic horror, which I say as a compliment to the Ukrainian fighters but still even they walk away with the burden of having to have been the wall that obliterated countless human bodies, which is an independent trauma to whether it had to be done or not.

Did a higher-up without military training make a demand that they do this mission?

Feels like the most likely answer.

Probably the same phenomenon that gave us Chornobaivka

"we are lucky they are so very stupid"

The biggest mistake people make about thinking about war is that decisions made about battlefield doctrine and adaption are necessarily evolutionary and rational since such a shocking loss of life is involved that inevitably an improvement in tactics will occur and successful strategies will not be unlearned unless they become ineffective.

This could not be further from the truth.

Just as every generation of journalists naive and aloof about learning the details and history of war claim authoritatively and breathlessly that "In this new era of warfare, the rules have changed and created a radical departure from the past!" every generation of soldiers, officers and generals who fight in wars develop their own set of maladapative beliefs, dogma and superstitions. Unlike the journalists however, the soldiers have an excuse as they are being subjected to life threatening situations they have little control over constantly and you can't expect people to remain in that headspace forever without coping mechanisms beginning to erode the edges of their lucid thinking.

What fighting a war does to an authoritarian organization is continutally reduce the field of valid solutions to adversity until the only response is mindless, ineffective concentrated violence. The more this response catastrophically fails the more paradoxically other possible solutions are foreclosed in favor of pouring more resources into mindless, ineffective concentrated violence in an attempt to brute force the solution.

The root cause of this spiral is that as obsessed with violence as fascism is, it is still yet more fervently opposed to curiosity and intellectual thought and from that follows the axiom that fascism will always abandon military professionalism in favor of fighting in a way that embraces the hollow aesthetics of violence and dominance. Over and over and over and over again it is a perpetual motion cycle see Finnegans Wake for more details.

They probably counted on being able to push through the killzone faster then they would be destroyed. And in the event that they wouldn't that on this part of the front AFU doesn't have enough positions so they could push trough anyway. It's not as dumb as it looks (dumb obviously but not completely braindead), as the 'frontline' isn't really something that you see in historical warfare, it's a number of dots on the map staggered by hundreds of meters usually. r*ssians try to do it by their own (sadly effective) strategy of methodical destruction by airbombs, infantry infiltration putting pressure on AFU, pilots moving closer, then artillery, result - total fire control. It's a costly and very slow but proven strategy.

It's a bold strategy cotton let's see if it pays off for them.