Hapless

Couldn't resist:
Also, fascinating to see at least one voice on Twitter insist that the MoD will win because it has more soldiers, more tanks, more etc than Wagner. Seriously? Have people not been paying attention to the last year and a half?

Also also, looks like Wagner is going on all in and upgrading from mutinty to coup:
 

Rename it Prigozhingrad, declare himself mini-Tsar and start charging the MoD to use the railways?

Jokes aside, if what he wants is leverage to force the MoD to back off and get himself into a position of critical importance, he's going for the right place. The MoD have a choice between cutting a deal or trying to dig him out- or alternatively, Putin has a choice between cutting Shoigu and Gerasimov out or watching the war collapse.

Rename it Prigozhingrad, declare himself mini-Tsar and start charging the MoD to use the railways?

Jokes aside, if what he wants is leverage to force the MoD to back off and get himself into a position of critical importance, he's going for the right place. The MoD have a choice between cutting a deal or trying to dig him out- or alternatively, Putin has a choice between cutting Shoigu and Gerasimov out or watching the war collapse.

Relevant (if blatant) self-promotion, but if anyone wants 4 hours of my take on where modern warfare came from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYvL90uFbwhO_2-ULfOsTR8EIz7VxbA27
Obviously this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpick, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the militaries of the time were big chunky organisations with plenty of variation in thought. The Cult of the Offensive was absolutely not a myth... but that doesn't mean that there were no officers or factions in the mix pushing for armies to adapt to (supposed) lessons of the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and Balkan Wars. 'Tactical fashion' ebbed and flowed over time, with attempts to adapt waxing in the aftermath of certain conflicts and waning as naturally conservative military establishments reasserted themselves. If WW1 had kicked off in 1917 and the lessons of the Balkan Wars had had more time to bed in, the opening phase could have been very different.
It's also worth noting that the historical record is not exactly crystal clear: the British might have struggled at first in 1899, but once they deployed a more 'continental' level of force they crushed the Boers. Grant beat Lee because he was the first Union General to go up against him and just keep coming, no matter how many casualties he suffered from battle to battle. The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the Prussians went faster and harder. And there are, of course, massive game changing technological developments in firepower over the same period that may- or may not- be changing the dynamics... but the victors in all those wars arguably won because they were able to sustain heavy losses.

Not to mention the obvious fact that no-one ever won a war without attacking.

RE: Close order massacres/ the offensive-defensive balance... Bussaco and Waterloo anyone? Column vs Line? If we really want to pull the thread we could maybe argue for Crecy and Agincourt, all the way back to the Thebans getting pelted with roof tiles in the streets of Plataea. I think the issue isn't simply one of firepower vs mass, but the ease with which one side can create the tactical conditions necessary for the other's failure.

Wellington was famously a master of exploiting reverse slopes- using the terrain to mask his force, manoeuvre to block incoming French columns and then break them with the shock action of massed firepower at close range. Fast forward a century and while those factors are still important, all it takes is one machinegun team in the right place at the right time to achieve the same thing.

Another century later and... we're looking at WW1 pumped up on steroids stood around wondering whether it's still relevant while a 100km deep, satellite, EW and drone enabled corrosive warfare campaign rages on overhead.

One problem to bear in mind looking up British doctrine/manuals etc from the time is that the British army was out doing Empire things most of the time. So the concept of peer-to-peer industrial scale war on the continent had to take a seat alongside colonial policing, punitive expeditions and general engagements against sub-peer opponents (comparisons to the recent emphasis on COIN anyone?). A year before running into magazine-rifle equipped Boers firing from trenches, the Brits were standing shoulder-to-shoulder repelling massed infantry charges at Omdurman, a year after they were sending raiding columns out into the mountains of the North-West Frontier.

For the Germans though, Balck's Manual from 1911 is pretty comprehensive: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64927/64927-h/64927-h.htm (the WW2 Balck's dad). I don't know whether it's in the original or this translation, but this version also includes notes on how other armies do things, which is very helpful.
Include gems like this:
And a good quick overview of the then open vs close order debate:
The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command by Andrew Gordon is a good deep look at Jutland and how the Royal Navy in the preceding 50-60 years, with a significant emphasis on signalling and how unwieldy it was having to rely on increasing combinations of signal flags. Hand-in-hand with that is the thread of naval command and control as some elements of the RN tried to adapt to either simplifying the signalling system or giving individual captains more freedom to act (including the tragi-farce of the HMS Victoria sinking- potentially an example of "Here's a stupid order, let's see if you're smart enough to not do it").
In general though, there was probably more continuity in tactics at sea than on land. The ranges are greater, but there was no 'devolution' of command in the same way as there was in No Man's Land: where a platoon commander in WW1 goes from being an unthinking cog in a battalion-sized machine to being an independent actor, the captain of a ship at Jutland is still the captain of a ship the way he was at Trafalgar. Battles were still fought in lines of ships trying to destroy one another with fire, just at much greater range.

Relevant (if blatant) self-promotion, but if anyone wants 4 hours of my take on where modern warfare came from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYvL90uFbwhO_2-ULfOsTR8EIz7VxbA27
Obviously this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpick, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the militaries of the time were big chunky organisations with plenty of variation in thought. The Cult of the Offensive was absolutely not a myth... but that doesn't mean that there were no officers or factions in the mix pushing for armies to adapt to (supposed) lessons of the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and Balkan Wars. 'Tactical fashion' ebbed and flowed over time, with attempts to adapt waxing in the aftermath of certain conflicts and waning as naturally conservative military establishments reasserted themselves. If WW1 had kicked off in 1917 and the lessons of the Balkan Wars had had more time to bed in, the opening phase could have been very different.
It's also worth noting that the historical record is not exactly crystal clear: the British might have struggled at first in 1899, but once they deployed a more 'continental' level of force they crushed the Boers. Grant beat Lee because he was the first Union General to go up against him and just keep coming, no matter how many casualties he suffered from battle to battle. The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the Prussians went faster and harder. And there are, of course, massive game changing technological developments in firepower over the same period that may- or may not- be changing the dynamics... but the victors in all those wars arguably won because they were able to sustain heavy losses.

Not to mention the obvious fact that no-one ever won a war without attacking.

RE: Close order massacres/ the offensive-defensive balance... Bussaco and Waterloo anyone? Column vs Line? If we really want to pull the thread we could maybe argue for Crecy and Agincourt, all the way back to the Thebans getting pelted with roof tiles in the streets of Plataea. I think the issue isn't simply one of firepower vs mass, but the ease with which one side can create the tactical conditions necessary for the other's failure.

Wellington was famously a master of exploiting reverse slopes- using the terrain to mask his force, manoeuvre to block incoming French columns and then break them with the shock action of massed firepower at close range. Fast forward a century and while those factors are still important, all it takes is one machinegun team in the right place at the right time to achieve the same thing.

Another century later and... we're looking at WW1 pumped up on steroids stood around wondering whether it's still relevant while a 100km deep, satellite, EW and drone enabled corrosive warfare campaign rages on overhead.

Relevant (if blatant) self-promotion, but if anyone wants 4 hours of my take on where modern warfare came from: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYvL90uFbwhO_2-ULfOsTR8EIz7VxbA27
Obviously this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpick, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the militaries of the time were big chunky organisations with plenty of variation in thought. The Cult of the Offensive was absolutely not a myth... but that doesn't mean that there were no officers or factions in the mix pushing for armies to adapt to (supposed) lessons of the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War and Balkan Wars. 'Tactical fashion' ebbed and flowed over time, with attempts to adapt waxing in the aftermath of certain conflicts and waning as naturally conservative military establishments reasserted themselves. If WW1 had kicked off in 1917 and the lessons of the Balkan Wars had had more time to bed in, the opening phase could have been very different.
It's also worth noting that the historical record is not exactly crystal clear: the British might have struggled at first in 1899, but once they deployed a more 'continental' level of force they crushed the Boers. Grant beat Lee because he was the first Union General to go up against him and just keep coming, no matter how many casualties he suffered from battle to battle. The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the Prussians went faster and harder. And there are, of course, massive game changing technological developments in firepower over the same period that may- or may not- be changing the dynamics... but the victors in all those wars arguably won because they were able to sustain heavy losses.

Not to mention the obvious fact that no-one ever won a war without attacking.

RE: Close order massacres/ the offensive-defensive balance... Bussaco and Waterloo anyone? Column vs Line? If we really want to pull the thread we could maybe argue for Crecy and Agincourt, all the way back to the Thebans getting pelted with roof tiles in the streets of Plataea. I think the issue isn't simply one of firepower vs mass, but the ease with which one side can create the tactical conditions necessary for the other's failure.

Wellington was famously a master of exploiting reverse slopes- using the terrain to mask his force, manoeuvre to block incoming French columns and then break them with the shock action of massed firepower at close range. Fast forward a century and while those factors are still important, all it takes is one machinegun team in the right place at the right time to achieve the same thing.

Another century later and... we're looking at WW1 pumped up on steroids stood around wondering whether it's still relevant while a 100km deep, satellite, EW and drone enabled corrosive warfare campaign rages on overhead.

I do believed there was a spectrum of thinking - always is - as warfare evolved. However the issue of where the center of that bellcurve of military thought laid (or currently lies) is found in how the force generation money was spent before the major milestones that we pin as defining moments.  So how were European troops training before WW1?  Was there a lot of trench warfare/siege training going on?  Was there a lot of artillery/infantry integration training?  Were they experimenting on trench warfare before WW1?  Now how about before WW2? 
You can apply this to any major conflict going pretty much as far back as you like.  “Creating tactical conditions for the other teams failure” is a very broad topic.  Firepower and mass are very simplistic but fundamentals elements.  So are C2, logistics, ISR, force protection.  Deeper stuff like culture, leadership and psychology.  And finally theory and doctrine.  One can argue that actual warfare is the collision of all these factors with reality.  That reality creates a unique but artificial environment - there common elements across collisions, however, each collision is also unique.  How well a military and the system that supports it can adapt to the environment is critical to success.  Adaptation is directly linked to sustaining and creating options, and options matter.
The easiest way to tell that militaries have gone into a conflict upside down is to assess just how far and fast they needed to adapt.  Victory and defeat lay in how well they adapted relative to an opponent.  This makes warfare as much an exercise in competitive collective learning as anything else. Collective learning with very high stakes.
So What?  Well mindset and culture are critical to how well we can learn.  A closed conservative mindset is going to learn very differently than an open exploration one.  I will let everyone make up their own minds on the military mindsets of the 19th century - the reality appears that they varied more than we thought but also less than realities demanded.  This is not what is important right now though.  What is important is our own modern military mindsets in the face of a changing military reality.  Where do we stand on the spectrum?  How well set up are we for rapid and effective adaptation as compared to our likely opponents?  Looking back to the cautionary tales of the previous centuries informs the one in front of us.

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again!
Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions.

This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box.

Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again!
Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions.

This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box.

Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

I tell my students exactly this - what has really changed and what is an anomaly?  That is the key question of this war.
I definitely have seen the power of diverse collective analysis on this forum.  In many ways the analysis here has been ahead of the professional military one, even though we have access to less information (but probably not as “less” as people think).

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again!
Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions.

This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box.

Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again!
Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions.

This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box.

Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again!
Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions.

This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box.

Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

We're in macro-masking/tactical deficit country again!
Like in WW1, this war has revealed (or confirmed, or reiterated, take your pick) that the factors influencing success in base tactical interactions did not align with the pre-war expectations of the belligerents. So officers have been ordering units around with an inaccurate concept of what they're capable of achieving in the prevailing conditions.

This happens all the time, the tricky part is figuring out what has changed and whether those changes are going to be important or applicable in the future... something people from a wide array of boxes typing in a wargame forum might be able to process better than a collection of people all sitting in the same military career box.

Or we can at least be wrong in original and unexpected ways!

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

I would suspect it's some kind of culturally embedded fatalism rather than fanaticism.

The quick version is that it's (probably) an exercise in economy of force. The flooding is a serious obstacle, meaning Russia can take troops out of the line opposite Kherson and use them to react to the Ukrainian offensive.

Quick TLDR:

Inundation is an ancient defensive measure- if the Russians are worried about Ukrainians crossing the Dnieper in the south then it makes sense to make improve the river as an obstacle. This obviously works below the damn because of rising levels, but also above in the Khakovka reservoir because as the water level drops it's going to make it potentially less navigable (ie. anyone crossing now has to worry about running into silt beds, rocks, wrecks etc that are now closer to the surface).

If the lack of water for the nuclear power plant makes a melt down more likely then, well, bonus. The risk might encourage Ukraine to be more cautious around the plant and an actual (if particualrly catastrophic) melt down might make the area a real no-go zone and secure the Dnieper flank even more.

What's really interesting is that Russia has only now blown up a major dam. It could be that dams are such chunky hardened structures (and that Russian stand-off precision weapons are not precise enough) that sneaking in overnight and packing the interior of the dam with explosives is the only way to blow one up.

The Dnieper has plenty of dams with an awful lot of water behind them all the way up to Kyiv. If the Kyiv reservoir is opened up, the mass of water might (big might, I don't know how the dams are rated) be enough to overwhelm the dams downstream, resulting in sequential dam failures all the way to Black Sea. That would not only obviously be an atrocious ecological and human disaster, but cut the country in half and sever Ukrainian logistics. Oh, and if that's not bad enough there are layers of radioactive sediment in the bottom of especially the northern reservoirs that could get churned up and added into the mix to make things even worse.

So I assume the Russians haven't done that because they can't... and hopefully it wonudl never work because all the dams along the Dnieper are massively overengineered Sovet megaprojects.