Stephen King is known as the king of horror for a reason. His books stand the test of time, and whether it be a terrifying killer clown or a deadly viral outbreak, King’s novels have a way of worming their way into your subconscious and finding a place to nest, laying eggs of horror that rattle around your brain. Pet Sematary is one of King’s classics and it’s easy to see why.

King himself confessed he was unable to finish this story at one point, given the toe-curling subject material. And that subject is death. Pet Sematary dabbles in our relationship with death and it does so by mixing that in with grief, sanity and the idea of resurrection. Or, more specifically, resurrecting one’s pet. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here!

For those unaware of this book, the story (like many of King’s stories) is set in a small town in Maine. A young doctor called Louis Creed has just sunk most of his money into buying a new house for the family. Alongside his wife Rachel, daughter Ellie and son Gage, they’ve also brought along their pet cat, Church, for the ride. This is a very different walk of life compared to the hustle and bustle of Chicago they’re more accustomed to, but everyone gets settled in all the same.

Louis quickly befriends his elderly neighbour, Jud Crandall (a’yuh) who shows him the “Pet Sematary”, a place where generations of children have buried their pets. However, there’s another burial ground behind that which holds a dark secret, something Louis is warned against. As one could morbidly say, curiosity kills the cat.

To give much more away would be a disservice to this story but in many ways, Pet Sematary’s horror does not lie with its jump scares or crazy twists. Instead, the true horror comes from the characters and how they think and feel about death. Every single character has a different stance on the matter, from curious Ellie asking about heaven or Rachel’s defiance to never speak on the matter, this exploration – across a slow burn 465 page length – is partly why the book works so well.

In typical King fashion, the prose is well written and mostly takes place from Louis’ perspective. With that aforementioned slow burn, when the moments of horror do show up, sparingly across the first 2/3rds of the novel I may add, they hit all the harder. There’s one sentence involving Gage that will catch up completely off-guard while the pair are flying a kite. Another time, Louis awakens from a bad dream to something horrifying occurring, in a paragraph that will stick with this reviewer for a long time.

Toward the end of the book this narrow perspective does expand, with individual chapters depicting Rachel and Jud’s journey. Each of these players are well defined and incredibly fleshed out and deep. The dialogue flows beautifully and whether it be Louis and Rachel’s spicy fight over whether to talk to their daughter about death or Jud and Louis’ lazy nights on the porch with a bottle of beer, every conversation has been deliberately placed to either develop the characters or link back to that earlier theme of death.

In many ways, Pet Sematary plays out as a character study of how grief and trauma can change people. Louis starts off a rational and level-headed man but over time, he starts to change. His beliefs soften, he meddles in matters he probably shouldn’t and by the end he’s a shadow of the man he once was.

This is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of tackling grief, how death can change people and, more importantly, how different people deal with this in very different ways. Louis, Jud and Rachel are three of the best examples of this, with the latter grappling some dark secrets from her childhood that have left her scarred for life. The conclusion to all of this is suitably twisted and deliciously dark, leaving on a very telling note that will have you thinking about this one long after you put the book down.

Pet Sematary is not King’s scariest book but in many ways it is the most disturbing. It’s a tough book to read at times and most certainly a slow burn. However, if you stick with this one, you’ll be rewarded with one heck of a story to chew over.

Although I didn’t think that I’d make a post so soon after my last post, it so happened that I do have something new to write about. Before I found out that I have autism at the end of July of 2023, I had been observing what effects probiotics have on my health. I reached some important conclusions, but then the discovery that I have autism completely shifted my attention. By that time, my supply of probiotics had run out and I didn’t acquire more probiotics until December of 2023. Therefore, since my attention had been on something else, I kind of forgot a few important things that I managed to determine about the effects of the probiotics on me. Even before I found out that I have autism, I reached the conclusion that probiotics can be very salutary for me. I order two types of probiotics on eBay. One type helps me with another health problem that I have because autism isn’t the only serious health condition that I have. The other type of probiotics reduces the severity of my autism problems. So, I take three capsules every day in order to feel better. Before the end of January, I had been taking two capsules, one of each type of probiotics. But it turns out that I need to take a minimum of three capsules every day because two isn’t enough. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for me to rediscover this fact. So, how do probiotics help me with my autism? They do this by giving me more energy. It turns out that I have chronic fatigue. I don’t know if this is caused by my autism or by that other health problem that I have. Perhaps both of these health problems contribute to my weariness. Therefore, I pretty much always feel tired and sleepy. This leads me to seriously underperform in whatever it is that I do if I don’t put in extra effort. Because of this lack of energy and strength, I usually can’t think well, I usually can’t speak well, I am usually inattentive, and physical activities are usually almost like torture for me. So, the probiotics provide me with at least some of the energy that I need. I don’t know if this problem, the chronic fatigue and lack of energy, affects a minority of autistics, a majority of autistics, or if it’s uncommon even among autistics. For me, however, it’s one of the most important problems. Perhaps it’s my most important problem. But, as I pointed out in one of my earlier posts, not all probiotics are helpful. My probiotics, which actually do help me, are from Slovakia and the Russian Federation. For example, the probiotics that I received that are made by a company in the United Kingdom didn’t help me. Anyway, as it turns out, I have some serious health problems, and it’s amazing that I’ve been able to do anything with all of these problems affecting me. Since I recently acquired another one of Michael Fitzgerald’s books, ‘Unstoppable Brilliance: Irish Geniuses and Asperger’s Syndrome’ (2014), it’s worth pointing out that this book too is worth getting for anyone who has Asperger syndrome. In this book, Fitzgerald selected nine famous people (Robert Emmet, Patrick Pearse, Eamon de Valera, Robert Boyle, William Rowan Hamilton, Daisy Bates, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett) and explained why they had autism. For me, Unstoppable Brilliance has been just as useful as Fitzgerald’s first two books, perhaps more so. In the book, he wrote, “So what exactly does it mean to have Asperger’s syndrome? In 1944, the Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger described the condition which we now call Asperger’s syndrome. The condition was fundamentally based on a problem with social interactions, as he saw it. In practice, people with this condition have problems with the to and fro of conversation and social interaction. In speech, they often use a high-pitched tone of voice or a monotonous one. They have problems reading non-verbal behaviour, or body language. They frequently engage in monologues which do not require the listener to interact with them, or else do not give listeners sufficient context on what they are speaking about – much to the confusion and consternation of listeners. Much of this is related to difficulties in seeing things from other people’s perspectives and in understanding social and emotional relationships. People with Asperger’s syndrome are often described as enigmatic, odd or eccentric. In reality, they are severely puzzled about the social world and social interactions. At times they can feel like an alien, living on a different planet from other people. As a consequence, they spend their lifetime trying to work out the pattern in the chaos around them. The interests of people with Asperger’s syndrome are frequently very narrow and specialised. Because of their enormous capacities for work, their phenomenal energy, their persistence, and their tendency to have a very narrow focus, they are usually successful in life. Essentially, they are driven more by their internal worlds and their internal ideas than by the social environment. As a result, they tend to be apolitical or take little interest in world affairs unless these things directly impinge on their consciousness. By and large, people with Asperger’s syndrome are very rigid, controlling and dominating. Characteristically, they develop rigid routines and rituals. They dislike change and strive for what is called ‘preservation of sameness’. In terms of sensory perception, they can be oversensitive or hypersensitive to touch, noise, smell and other stimuli, and they are often fussy eaters. Their motor co-ordination can be poor, and they are frequently clumsy. At times, they have difficulty separating fact from fiction – something which often earns them a reputation for lying and deceit. Contrary to popular belief, they can have massively creative imaginations, though as children they tend not to engage in pretend play and take all meanings literally. It is not uncommon for people to perceive them as being narrow, eccentric, narcissistic and grandiose. Because of their social difficulties, they can suffer from depression and indeed often exhibit a great deal of anxiety. In the past it was not uncommon, given their difficulties with separating fact from fiction, for them to be misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia and being inappropriately placed in services for persons with schizophrenia or similar institutions. Indeed, adults with Asperger’s syndrome are still commonly misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. Depending on the severity of depression and the difficulties they experience in terms of social interaction, they can develop suicidal ideas, and indeed suicide is not rare among members of this group. Some people with Asperger’s syndrome can also be plagued by poor health in general. In school, their poor social interaction can give rise to difficulties, and they are often misdiagnosed by teachers as having ‘conduct disorder’ due to behaviour problems. They may show little interest in formal education and be daydreamers in class. In the past, many people with autistic spectrum disorders were only diagnosed as having learning disability – the ‘slow learners’ – or were misdiagnosed as having learning disability and confined to the learning-disability services. We now know that a dual diagnosis of autism and learning disability is not uncommon. These people therefore require special interventions for both autism and learning disability. Furthermore, they require special speech and language programmes, special communication skills programmes and special help with reading non-verbal behaviour. At secondary school, people with Asperger’s syndrome often drop out due to bullying or depression, or because of their difficulties in managing social interaction. As they are seen as odd, different or peculiar, they are often a target for bullying. Indeed Yeats, Joyce and Beckett were all bullied at various stages of their schooling. At university – if they get there – they have an extremely high drop-out rate in their first year because of problems with social interaction, organisation and social awareness. Feeling lonely and isolated, they can experience the world as being against them, and they often show paranoid traits in early adulthood and later.”

So, how common are people with Asperger syndrome? They make up about 0.5% of the population. Therefore, they are not common. But famous people with Asperger syndrome are very common. In the words of the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, “They have made remarkable contributions to human history.” I can mention that the astronomer Carl Sagan, the musician Prince, the singer Dusty Springfield, the mathematician Victor Glushkov, the philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, the writer Isaac Asimov, the writer Arthur C. Clarke, the polymath Leonardo da Vinci, the writer Mary Shelley, and the painter Edward Hopper had autism. Since I have autism, it’s much easier for me to recognize autistics than for a normal (neurotypical) person. But I’m mentioning these names only because they’ve been on my mind recently for one reason or another, because I know enough about them in order to point out that they were autistics, and because they are no longer alive. As I’ve mentioned already, famous people with autism are very common. Moreover, since I’ve had more time to think about my past, I can say that I did come across other autistics when I attended high school. I can say for certain that there were two students with autism from Iran at the high school that I attended. One of them was a year or two older than me, and I never got to speak to him. The other was a classmate of mine, Ashkan Mohammadi, and I got to speak to him on a number of occasions. Like most other autistics, Ashkan didn’t know that he’s autistic, and he believed that his problems come from a head injury that he suffered as a child. He even showed me the small scar on his head from this injury. In reality, however, it’s now obvious to me that he’s autistic, and I think that he inherited his autism from his mother. He also mentioned that his mother’s father or grandfather (I don’t remember which one) was a Russian when I was at his home. I think that his mother was the originator of the theory about him being not normal because of his head injury, and she was very protective of him. So, whenever Ashkan got insulted or made fun of at school, he’d tell his mother, and his mother would go to the home of the person who mocked him and sort things out with the parents there. I’m autistic too, but I never got such special treatment. I was bullied a lot when I attended school, but I never told my parents about this and they almost never did anything about my problems. Well, my parents are Russians, and Russians are the most idiotic people in the world. Anyway, me and Ashkan didn’t really get along. Like just about every other person with autism, he was generally unfriendly, rude, resentful, and he couldn’t engage in conversations. I think that his autistic behavior was more obvious than mine and that it was also worse than mine. He had a little brother, and I think that his brother had autism too. Still, Ashkan was a little easier to talk to than, for example, my father, who has the mentality of an impudent and aggressive child and who has no feelings. Don’t believe me? Fine, I’ll mention, for example, that when his wife was pregnant with his daughter, he made her help him to push his car out of the snow during winter. As a result, his wife gave birth two months prematurely, and this probably resulted in his daughter having a number of health problems. Another example – he’s such a hothead that it’s pretty much impossible to talk to him because whenever you say something to him that he doesn’t like he attacks you like a psychopath and says that he will physically hurt you. Think I’m exaggerating? Fine, I’ll mention that his aggression got him beaten up so badly by some other recruits when he was in the army that he fainted as a result. By the way, I’m glad that this happened because this shows that there’s at least a little justice in the world. If you still don’t believe me, your head must be filled with straw. Fine. Another example – he has never said anything nice to me, and, if he did, this happened so rarely that I have to think very hard in order to remember anything. In fact, he has always mocked and insulted me and tried to do nasty things to me. When I was little, he viciously beat me whenever I did something that he didn’t like. And he doesn’t only beat and attack children and insult them with the worst insults imaginable. He also beats and attacks pets, and even sexually assaults them. When I called him a bully once, his reply to me was, “Yes I am, and you’re the victim.” Anyway, it seems that I got a little carried away and began writing about some kind of monster and psychopath. Well, I think that Tom Cruise knows what it’s like to have a similar father. It is worth wondering, however, if the woman that married such a “man” is a masochist or not. Perhaps she liked it when he squeezed the butts and boobs of her sisters. By the way, I can mention a lot more about this seemingly mentally ill subject, but my post can’t be pages long and I really don’t like to think about him. Of course, there are reasons why he’s like this. For example, he was neglected and abused by his parents. Let’s get back on track. I had another classmate in high school, a Canadian, who probably had autism. He sat at the desk behind me in Spanish class, and he sometimes annoyed me by unexpectedly poking me in the ribs from behind, although it’s worth mentioning that my relations with him weren’t hostile and I got to speak to him a number of times on normal terms. At least one, possibly three, of my teachers in high school had autism. One was a Chemistry teacher, another one was a Math teacher, and another one was a Social Studies teacher. The Chemistry teacher, in particular, was disliked by many of his students because of his unpleasant behavior and because he always attempted to give his students the lowest grades possible. The Math teacher was a woman who openly insulted me once for no good reason. Perhaps she disliked or even hated me because I’m from a certain country. Autistic people can have strong, sometimes irrational likes or dislikes. So, although intelligent autistics are uncommon, I wouldn’t say that they are very rare.

Georgia Street is an east–west street in the cities of Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Its section in Downtown Vancouver, designated West Georgia Street, serves as one of the primary streets for the financial and central business districts, and is the major transportation corridor connecting downtown Vancouver with the North Shore (and eventually Whistler) by way of the Lions Gate Bridge. The remainder of the street, known as East Georgia Street between Main Street and Boundary Road and simply Georgia Street within Burnaby, is more residential in character, and is discontinuous at several points.

West of Seymour Street, the thoroughfare is part of Highway 99. The entire section west of Main Street was previously designated part of Highway 1A, and markers for the ‘1A’ designation can still be seen at certain points.

Starting from its western terminus at Chilco Street by the edge of Stanley Park, Georgia Street runs southeast, separating the West End from the Coal Harbour neighbourhood. It then runs through the Financial District; landmarks and major skyscrapers along the way include Living Shangri-La (the city’s tallest building), Trump International Hotel and Tower, Royal Centre, 666 Burrard tower, Hotel Vancouver and upscale shops, the HSBC Canada Building, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Georgia Hotel, Four Seasons Hotel, Pacific Centre, the Granville Entertainment District, Scotia Tower, and the Canada Post headquarters. The eastern portion of West Georgia features the Theatre District (including Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts), Library Square (the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library), Rogers Arena, and BC Place. West Georgia’s centre lane between Pender Street and Stanley Park is used as a counterflow lane.

East of Cambie Street, Georgia Street becomes a one-way street for eastbound traffic, and connects to the Georgia Viaduct for eastbound travellers only; westbound traffic is handled by Dunsmuir Street and the Dunsmuir Viaduct, located one block to the north.

East Georgia Street begins at the intersection with Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown, then runs eastwards through Strathcona, Grandview–Woodland and Hastings–Sunrise to Boundary Road. East of the municipal boundary, Georgia Street continues eastwards through Burnaby until its terminus at Grove Avenue in the Lochdale neighbourhood. This portion of Georgia Street is interrupted at several locations, such as Templeton Secondary School, Highway 1 and Kensington Park.

Georgia Street was named in 1886 after the Strait of Georgia, and ran between Chilco and Beatty Streets. After the first Georgia Viaduct opened in 1915, the street’s eastern end was connected to Harris Street, and Harris Street was subsequently renamed East Georgia Street.

The second Georgia Viaduct, opened in 1972, connects to Prior Street at its eastern end instead. As a result, East Georgia Street has been disconnected from West Georgia ever since.

On June 15, 2011 Georgia Street became the focal point of the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence on Sunday listed some of the setbacks that the Russian military is experiencing in Ukraine amid its ongoing invasion, adding that those failures are “likely to endure.”

“The forward deployment of commanders has exposed them to significant risk, leading to disproportionately high losses of Russian officers in this conflict,” the ministry said in a tweet. “This has resulted in a force that is slow to respond to setbacks and unable to alter its approach on the battlefield. These issues are likely to endure given the relative lack of operational command experience of the officers promoted in place of those killed.”

The British Defence Ministry also said that senior commanders were prompted to go onto the battlefield likely to personally lead operations due to “difficulties in command and control” and “faltering Russian performance on the front line.”

“However, it is not clear that the presence of these commanders on the battlefield has led to a refined or altered operational concept. Flawed planning assumptions and failures in sustainment continue to undermine Russian progress,” the ministry added.

Meanwhile, officials have suggested that Russia is not progressing in its war. On Wednesday, the Pentagon’s press secretary John Kirby said during a briefing that Russia is not achieving its desired goals.

“All I can tell you is that the Russians have not made the kind of progress in the Donbas and the south that we believe they wanted to make. We do believe they’re behind schedule. We do believe it’s been slow, and at every turn, they have met a stiff Ukrainian resistance,” he said.

Kirby also suggested that Russian precision-guided missiles have missed their targets in Ukraine possibly due to “technical issues,” adding that “it certainly could be Ukrainian defenses, or it could just be incompetence on the part of operators.”

The United States estimated that Russia’s failure rates in Ukraine are as high as 60 percent for some of its precision-guided missiles, three unnamed U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence, told Reuters in March. However, the U.S. officials didn’t mention evidence to back this assessment and didn’t provide details about the exact reasons behind the high missile failure rates.

Former NATO commander, James Stavridis said last week that Russia has shown “amazing incompetence” in Ukraine.

“In modern history, there is no situation comparable in terms of the deaths of generals,” he said during a radio interview on WABC 770 AM. “Just to make a point of comparison here, the United States in all of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq…in all of those years and all of those battles, not a single general lost in actual combat. On the Russian side, in a two-month period, we have seen at least a dozen, if not more Russian generals killed. So amazing incompetence.”

Stavridis also said that Russia’s military has the “inability to conduct logistics” and “battle plans.”

However, Russia seems to believe otherwise when its Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in March on its Twitter account that its operation in Ukraine is going “according to plan.”

Newsweek reached out to the Russia’s foreign affairs ministry and its defense ministry for comment.

The Russian military invaded Ukraine on false or otherwise flawed assumptions about the Ukrainian military, and Western views of the Russian military were often equally as wrong. Senior U.S. military officers and government officials believed the Russian military would quickly destroy Ukrainian resistance, with some officials speculating that Kyiv would fall within seventy-two hours. Instead, the attack on Kyiv stalled, with the infamous forty-mile convoy becoming the climax of Russian logistical and planning failures that led to the embarrassing withdrawal from Kyiv in late March. Perhaps the West fell prey to the Russian information campaigns that have been demonstrated during military campaigns over the years, such as Russian involvement in the Syrian Civil War or the “Little Green Men” in Crimea. Military analysts ultimately believed that the Russian military had reformed after Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov’s 2008 “New Look” reforms.

The invasion of Ukraine has shown some of the operational design flaws that were endemic and characteristic of the post-Soviet Russian military, which Serdyukov’s reforms were meant to address. Poor force design and employment, flawed intelligence and reconnaissance, uncoordinated command and control, and systemic logistical problems still run across all levels of Russian command. The overabundance of Russian missteps in local conflicts since the fall of the Soviet Union should have helped analysts see the Russian military’s shortcomings. Even though they are not exhaustive, a brief look at these shortcomings may have helped shape a different Western perception of the Russian military before the invasion.

Ukraine 2022

Once hostilities broke out in Ukraine this February, the Russian military was plagued by poor intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, just as it was in past conflicts, highlighting a recurring problem. For example, according to open-source reporting during the now well-known counteroffensive in Kharkiv, the Russian military often lost track of Ukrainian brigade elements, leading to the successful Ukrainian rout of Russian forces in the region. Specifically, by the summer of 2022, the manning situation had become so dire in some parts of the sector that the 45th Guards GRU Spetsnaz Brigade, which was the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) and the GRU’s premier deep reconnaissance unit, had one battalion manning defenses southwest of Izyum and a second battalion manning defenses in northernmost part of northeast Kherson Province. This left the entire Russian force in the region effectively blind. Russia has also lost 148 reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles during the war.

At the start of the special military operation (SMO), Russian motorized rifle battalions appeared to operate at between 65 to 75 percent. Shortages in manpower only became more dramatic, leading to the call for partial mobilization in September. Throughout the summer, manning issues worsened because Russian leader Vladimir Putin would not approve mobilization and because the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense’s ad hoc, ninety-day reservist-based solutions kept expiring. By August, members of the 152nd Guards Missile Brigade, an Iskander Brigade from Kaliningrad, were performing infantry functions in a quasi-attempt to hold part of the 11th Army Corps’ defensive line northwest of Izyum. Perhaps most surprisingly, the training of Russian forces appeared to be underdeveloped, even among more elite forces like the naval infantry, VDV, and Spetsnaz.

Russia’s command and control continues to be equally dreadful. Reports suggest that the Russian military did not have a theater commander in Ukraine until late April, when now-relieved Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov was appointed to lead Russian forces in theater. Up to that point, each Combined Arms Army operated independently through its axes of advance, with little overall coordination. Coordination amongst military units seemed haphazard, with Rosgvardiya—National Guard forces—sometimes in the lead of Russian formations. Russian commanders appeared to have vast communication issues, which may have led to some of these Russian commanders being targeted and killed by Ukrainian troops. In a now-famous video, 90th Guards Tank Division members operated unsecured on their secured system, and their communications were intercepted in an ambush in eastern Kyiv and broadcast worldwide.

Moreover, secure communications have not worked because ERA, the Russian cryptophone introduced in 2021, relies on ground-based 3G and 4G infrastructure. Additionally, the GRU’s Strelets reconnaissance, command-and-control, and communications system, which also uses 3G and 4G technology, was disrupted early in the invasion. Russia has lost 201 command posts and communication stations since the onset of hostilities, making command and control difficult across the battlefield.

Chechnya I

In 1994, the Russian military, a force inherited from the Soviet Union, was in chaos. Officers had not received pay for months, and the Russian economy struggled to convert from a state-planned economy to a capitalistic market economy. During the organizational upheavals that quickly followed, Russia plunged its military into a battle with a determined and flexible enemy, some of whom had served in the Soviet Armed Forces and had Soviet equipment at their disposal. The same Russian egotism that led to predictions in February of Kyiv falling within days was also abundant in Grozny, with then-Russian minister of defense Gen. Pavel Grachev bragging that Grozny would fall in two hours.

After a series of failed and forceful attempts to dispose of Dzhokhar Dudayev, Chechnya’s president and a former Soviet Air Force general, Russia deployed a contingency force to Grozny, which proved disastrous. Kremlin security officials believed Dudayev and his army to be a disorganized criminal element that would be subdued on the sight of the first Russian tank, failing to grasp true Chechen aims and capabilities. Russian tactics were organized more on a display of force than a movement to contact. Intimidation and coercion were the main objectives. Detailed planning for the military intervention in Chechnya did not begin until two weeks before the operation, which had consequential effects throughout the entire twenty-one-month operation.

A Soviet and Russian adage for force generation—“Personnel: check! Equipment: check!, Training: optional”—lives strongly inside Russian planners’ minds. At the time of the attack on Grozny, Russian forces had not conducted divisional or regimental field training since before the collapse of the Soviet military. Most Russian battalions were manned at 55 percent, and not a single Russian regiment was manned at full strength. Russian units were casually constructed, and a considerable quantity of Russian soldiers were conscripts; none had trained together before going into the streets of Grozny. In the 81st Brigade, 90th Guards Tank Division, forty-nine out of the fifty-six platoon commanders had been at the military academy weeks before the beginning of hostilities. 50 percent of the men who hastily assembled for operations in Grozny had never fired a shell from their tank. Russian commanders suffered communication breakdowns at the platoon, company, and battalion levels. They were often forced to transmit over clear radio, allowing Chechen fighters to monitor their transmissions and insert false messages to confuse Russian forces.

As the Russian military began operations into Grozny, Russian commanders committed their armor forces without infantry support. Instead of pinpointing primary efforts and objectives, Russian troops advanced in three separate, isolated, and mutually unsupported columns. In an identical fashion to the war in Ukraine, where hundreds of videos show Russian tank formations operating alone in cities or villages, the Russians suffered catastrophic losses as tanks and personnel carriers entered the city and became apparent targets for Chechnya hunter-killer teams. As the battle of Grozny waned, 102 out of the 120 Russian infantry fighting vehicles and twenty of the twenty-six tanks that had entered the city were wiped out. The 1st battalion of the 131st Motorized Rifle Brigade entered the city with 1,000 soldiers; by January 3, as it entered the city center, the unit had lost 800. Russia also failed to block off the city, as Soviet (and later Russian) doctrine, learned after World War II, prescribed.

The Chechnyan and Ukrainian invasions in 2022 share some resemblances. Both saw inadequately staffed units, poor use of combined arms leading to catastrophic effects on the armored force, and inadequate intelligence collection—amplified by endemic corruption—resulting in a misconception of the enemy. Just like in Chechnya, Russian security forces painted an erroneous picture of realities, leading military planners to underestimate Ukrainian troops. Much like in Grozny, Russian armor entered cities without infantry support. Weakly executed reconnaissance meant that Russian commanders headed blindly into Grozny. Russian forces did not know Chechnyan strongholds in the city and, therefore, blindly committed frontal troops instead of bypassing them. This underscores further command and control problems that date back to 1995.

Georgia

By 2006, the Russian military was training for a confrontation with Georgia with large-scale military exercises in the North Caucasus Military District that looked like a dress rehearsal for an attack on Georgia. After a Georgian military attack on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, Russia attacked Georgia on August 8, 2008. The geography and military disparity between Russia and Georgia during the conflict resulted in unsurprising outcomes. However, a closer look shows evidence of Russian shortcomings similar to those in Chechnya and Ukraine.

According to Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian General Staff, only 17 percent of the ground forces units were combat-ready. Only 5 of the 150 regiments in the Russian air force were combat-ready, and half of the Russian fleet could not leave port. Russian contract soldiers did not perform well during the operation, with most of the fighting being conducted by special-purpose forces, such as Russian airborne or Spetsnaz troops. The Russian air force’s failure to suppress Georgia’s limited air defense capabilities and its difficulties identifying friend or foe raise questions about its effectiveness.

During the five-day war, command and control proved to be a critical shortcoming for Russian forces. Makarov had been appointed to his post weeks before the invasion, and the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian General Staff, a key position in direct control of the Georgian operation, did not have a commanding officer during the war. District-level commanders did not have complete control of the air force. Instead, the air force was directed by Gen. Alexander Zelin, the air force’s commander, using a cell phone from his office in Moscow. Communication systems were obsolete, with many being from Soviet-era stocks. During one of the battles on August 8, it was reported that General Anatoly Khrulyov, the 58th Combined Arms Army’s commander, had to use a journalist’s cell phone to communicate with his forces because communication with his units was unavailable. Russia was so surprised by the timing of the attack on South Ossetia that the Russian General Staff was in the process of moving to a new location on August 8.

Intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance were equally dreadful for Russian forces in the Georgian campaign. Russia was both blind and deaf during the conflict. For example, on the afternoon of August 9, a Russian convoy of thirty infantry fighting vehicles encountered elements of the Georgian 3rd Infantry Brigades reconnaissance company. According to the book The Tanks of August, both the Russians and the Georgians were taken by surprise, and the ensuing firefight killed three Russians and eight Georgian soldiers, destroyed twenty-five out of thirty vehicles, and seriously wounded Khrulyov, along with several Russian journalists.

Conclusion

Poor command and control, reconnaissance and intelligence, logistics, force employment, and training have led to a weak showing for the Russian military in Ukraine. Military analysts failed to see the Russian military for what it is: a military that still lacks basic military training, suffers from crippling manpower shortages and inadequate Soviet-era equipment, and, at times, is poorly led. Assumptions of Russian military dominance were mainly based on Russian capabilities vis-à-vis Ukraine and the belief that most of Russia’s military reforms since 2008 had fixed institutional problems that manifested in Chechnya and Georgia. This turned out to be false, and Russia is suffering from the same mistakes today as it did in 1995. We should not have been surprised by Russian performance in this conflict, and it seems that Russia cannot escape its history.