Russia’s Human Wave Attacks Are Another Step Into Hell
Reading this story, I now believe it is a virtual certainty that Putin will fail in his efforts to subdue Ukraine. I put a high probability that someone will put a bullet in his head, which might turn out to be the parent of one of the boys this article describes, who perished in one of the madman’s human-wave assaults. However, whether that prediction is correct or not, I am fully convinced that his fate is sealed – that he is now destined by his own actions to suffer the inglory of bitter defeat and go down in history as another Hitler, or Milosevic.
All of our hope is that this war does not devolve into a broader global struggle. Time will tell. We don’t know. But of Putin’s place in history, there is already no doubt!
Using young men as cannon fodder isn’t new, but it’s still diabolical. That’s Putin for you.
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Bloomberg: Russia’s ‘Human Wave Attacks’ Are Another Step Into Hell
“Keep going until you’re killed.” That’s what Andrei Medvedev recalls being told by his commanders at the Wagner Group, a private Russian mercenary army that recruits people like him out of prison to wage the Kremlin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Medvedev is unusual in that he not only lived to tell the tale but somehow escaped to Norway. Most others in his situation aren’t so lucky. As the war approaches its first anniversary, increasing numbers of Russians in Ukraine — both regular soldiers and Wagner mercenaries — are being treated by their superiors as “cannon fodder.” Barely trained and often badly armed, they’re ordered to throw themselves at the more hardened Ukrainian defenders, in a cynical tactic based on overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers.
Another name for this approach is “human-wave attacks.” They’ve been a tragically recurring feature of modern warcraft — from the trenches of World War I to the Soviet onslaught against the Finns and Germans in World War II, from the Chinese assaults on South Korean and American troops in the Korean War to the Iranian charges against the Iraqis in the 1980s.
For attackers and defenders alike, these “waves” represent unfathomable horror. Survivors invariably clutch at non-human — and therefore dehumanizing — metaphors in describing the experience, so that it’s easy to forget that the waves, surges and tides consist not of water molecules, but of frightened or delirious young men or boys.
“They were like a tide, ceaselessly crashing on the shore, one after another,” a South Korean veteran later said about a Chinese human-wave attack in 1951. “They had no guns, only grenades, so they needed to get within 25 meters of us. We were firing all the time, yet they kept coming and coming. Their faces were expressionless. The barrels of our machine guns were turning red and warping from the overheating.”
To get young men to hurl themselves into the hail of enemy bullets and near-certain death appears to require either or both of two conditions. One is fanaticism. The Chinese in the Korean War were fired by Maoist revolutionary fervor. The Iranian youths running into Iraqi artillery and gas were sure they had “passports to paradise” and were becoming martyrs.
The alternative prerequisite is terror — of somebody and something even worse than the enemy soldiers in front: the commanders in the rear who gave the order. One consistent element in human-wave attacks is that the superiors who seal the boys’ fates make clear that turning around during the assault will lead to an even more certain, and even more gruesome, death.
Do human-wave attacks ever make military “sense”? It’s hard to say, and therefore unlikely. The Soviets eventually prevailed against the Germans — with millions of casualties — but not against the Finns. The Chinese and North Koreans reversed the American-led advance northward on the Korean peninsula, but only won a stalemate that continues to this day. The Iranians achieved nothing at all, only dragging the war into an eight-year horror which ended in a ceasefire.
What, then, are the Russians hoping to achieve? Their cannon-fodder strategy on the Ukrainian front, in places like Bakhmut and elsewhere, appears aimed at wearing out the more determined but less numerous Ukrainians, while keeping the Kremlin’s crack units in reserve for a breakthrough, should that opportunity arise.
Obviously, this tactic implies a mind-boggling callousness and cynicism on the part of the Russian command. That includes everybody from the army’s top brass to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Putin confidante who founded and runs the Wagner Group, and of course their common warlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
These men have not only been waging a genocidal war against Ukrainian civilians. They’ve also been sacrificing the youth of their own country — many drafted from ethnic minorities in remote regions or plucked by Prigozhin right out of prisons. There are no reliable numbers. But American officials estimate that the Russians have already lost about 200,000 dead or wounded in the war, with the rate accelerating to several hundreds every day.
The Ukrainians are losing fewer fighters, but also have a smaller population of new soldiers to draw on. In the Kremlin’s diabolical arithmetic, that apparently validates the strategy of human-wave attacks.
“The Chinese treated their soldiers as bullets, not as humans,” that South Korean veteran recalled. We could say the same today about Putin. As the massive offensives of spring draw nigh, let the whole world — even and especially including Russians — be clear about whom the Ukrainians are fighting and the Russians are serving: a man to whom human life means nothing.
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Russia’s Human Wave Attacks Are Another Step Into Hell
Russia’s Human Wave Attacks Are Another Step Into Hell
New research shows small gestures matter even more than we may think.
Colombo Family Crime Boss and 12 Others Are Arrested, Prosecutors Say
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday accuses the organization of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort a labor union.
For two decades, the leadership of the Colombo crime family extorted a Queens labor union, federal prosecutors said — an effort that continued unabated even as members of the mob clan cycled through prison, the family’s notorious longtime boss died, and as federal law enforcement closed in.
Over time, what began as a Colombo captain’s shakedown of a union leader, complete with expletive-laced threats of violence, expanded into a cottage industry, prosecutors said, as the Colombo organization assumed control of contracting and union business, with side operations in phony construction certificates, marijuana trafficking and loan-sharking.
On Tuesday, 11 reputed members and associates of the Colombo crime family, including the mob clan’s entire leadership, were charged in a labor racketeering case brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
All but two of the men were arrested Tuesday morning across New York and New Jersey, prosecutors said. Another was surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday; another defendant, identified as the family consigliere, remained at large, prosecutors said.
The indictment accuses the Colombo family of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort an unnamed labor union that represented construction workers, using threats of violence to secure payments and arrange contracts that would benefit the crime family.
The charges are an ambitious effort by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down one of the city’s five Mafia families. In addition to the union extortion scheme, which is the heart of the racketeering charge, the indictment charges several misdeeds often associated with the mob, including drug trafficking, money laundering, loan-sharking and falsifying federal labor safety paperwork.
Detention hearings for the defendants in Brooklyn federal court continued into the evening Tuesday, as they entered not-guilty pleas to the charges; prosecutors had asked the court to keep 10 of the defendants in custody.
“Everything we allege in this investigation proves history does indeed repeat itself,” Michael J. Driscoll, F.B.I. assistant director-in-charge, said in a statement. “The underbelly of the crime families in New York City is alive and well.”
Around 2001, prosecutors said, Vincent Ricciardo — a reported captain in the family, also known as “Vinny Unions” — began to demand a portion of a senior labor union official’s salary. When Mr. Ricciardo was convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges in the mid-2000s, prosecutors said, his cousin continued to collect those payments.
Starting in late 2019, prosecutors said, the senior leadership of the Colombo family became directly involved in the shakedown, which extended to broader efforts to siphon money from the union: for example, manipulating the selection of union health fund vendors to contract with entities connected to the family, and diverting more than $10,000 each month from the fund to the family.
Andrew Russo, 87, who prosecutors describe as the family boss, is accused of taking part in those efforts, as well as a money-laundering scheme to send the proceeds of the union extortion through intermediaries to Colombo associates. He was among nine defendants charged with racketeering.
Mr. Russo appeared in court virtually from the hospital Tuesday; he is set to be detained upon his release, pending a future bail hearing.
The family’s infamous longtime boss, Carmine J. Persico, died in federal custody in North Carolina in March 2019.
Federal law enforcement learned of the extortion scheme about a year ago, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday; investigators gathered thousands of hours of wiretapped calls and conversations recorded by a confidential witness, wrote the prosecutors, who also described law-enforcement surveillance of meetings among the accused conspirators.
The authorities said they repeatedly captured Mr. Ricciardo and his associates threatening to kill the union official. “I’ll put him in the ground right in front of his wife and kids,” Mr. Ricciardo was recorded saying in June.
On another occasion cited by prosecutors in the memo seeking his detention, Mr. Ricciardo directed the union official to hire a consultant selected by the Colombo family, saying: “It’s my union and that’s it.” Prosecutors said his activities were overseen by a Colombo soldier and the consigliere who remains at large.
Much of the activity outlined in the indictment took place while the defendants were either in prison or on supervised release for prior federal mob-related convictions. Theodore Persico Jr., described as a family captain and soldier, was released from federal prison in 2020 and, despite a directive not to associate with members of organized crime, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Persico, 58, is set to inherit the role of boss after Mr. Russo, prosecutors wrote.
Several of the defendants were named in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent safety training scheme, in which they falsified state and federal paperwork that is required for construction workers to show they have completed safety training courses.
One of the defendants, John Ragano — whom prosecutors say is a soldier in the Bonanno crime family — is accused of setting up phony occupational safety training schools in New York, which prosecutors said were “mills” that provided fraudulent safety training certificates to hundreds of people.
In October 2020, prosecutors said, an undercover law enforcement officer visited one of the schools in Ozone Park, Queens, and received, from Mr. Ricciardo’s cousin, a blank test form and an answer sheet; weeks later, the agent returned to pick up his federal safety card and paid $500.
The purported schools were also used for meetings with members of La Cosa Nostra — the group of crime families commonly known as the Mafia — and to store illegal drugs and fireworks, according to the indictment.
Mr. Ragano wasn’t charged on the racketeering count, although prosecutors also sought his detention pending trial. In addition to the racketeering count, several defendants, including Mr. Ricciardo and his cousin, were charged with extortion, conspiracy, fraud and conspiracy to make false statements.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people identified in an indictment as members of the Colombo crime family. It is 11, not more than a dozen.