You're making a pretty serious assumption that they're doing something haphazard rather than something calculated and planned. What's your reason for first assuming incompetence?
IMO we want to believe that the second best military on the planet is not competent because it is more comforting than the idea that the second best military actually planned out this assault on a sovereign country.
The last time I checked, being Russian doesn't make you immune to radiation. Controlling land is pretty pointless if you've poisoned it into uninhabitability for the next few generations or so.
What makes you think that what they're doing has significant risk of making the land uninhabitable? All we know is that there's a fire at the perimeter. That's it. It could be that what they're doing has little risk. From reading the twitter threads, seen elsewhere in this comment section, that seems to be the case. Not surprisingly, nuclear power plants are made pretty well.
I don't think there's any evidence that they're acting irrationally, from within their context. Making the land uninhabitable would be irrational, for everything we know of their context.
I'm not sure I understand. Were they captured? Were the drivers killed? Did the drivers perhaps have relatives/friends in Ukraine? Were they told to leave them there?
