I have to be misunderstanding this

You’re not.

How fucking dumb are these people?

Yes it’s dumber than a bucket of hair but you have to reflect on how they ended up here. Russia started a 21st Century war with a 20th Century Soviet built military. Back then a field radio was the size of your damn chest and they weren’t even issued at the platoon level. That shit obviously isn’t going to work on the modern battlefield where they have to control drones, guided artillery, distribute real time high resolution satellite imagery, and the battle lines shift by the hour instead of monthly.

The Soviet’s didn’t need these things and because they hadn’t been invented yet Russia showed up without them and promptly got cock-slapped by Western backed Ukrainian forces who were vastly more prepared because The West, including both military and private companies, spent literally Trillions of dollars investing in a robust and secure communications infrastructure.

The Russian Army absolutely required this kind of communications infrastructure to function on a modern battlefield but it didn’t exist so they did what they always do and applied their “Ingenuity” to the problem. They came up with using things like private Discord rooms, piggybacking on Ukraine’s cellular infrastructure, and hijacking Starlink; basically using the same Western tech that Ukraine was using.

So in the contest of not have anything at all and using tech that was subject to Western spying the Russian Military, at least at some level, chose the latter.

It seems that perhaps the Russian MoD has decided that the Western spying has become to pervasive and is shutting down these cobble-together communication and control systems but that’s going to put the field level operations right back to where they were 2 years ago.

You can’t win a 21st Century fight with 20th Century systems. It’s like playing a game of Civilization where you’ve got Aircraft Carriers and the other player is attacking you with Canoes.