The Soviets in WWII used human waves against the Nazis. (EDIT: They did not, they used them against the Finns in the Winter War.) That said, the USSR was capable of combined-armed warfare.
Russia has proved incapable of combined-arms warfare. They launched human waves in Bakhmut, and are largely using numerical advantages in raw recruits to push for marginal gains. This isn’t how a modern army fights.
Soviet himan waves are as much myth as are the Germans calling it Blitzkrieg. The only thing comming close to these himan wave attacks are the failed Banzai charges of desperate Japanese forces. And thoae never worked.
It's not "human waves" in Ukraine, it's advance by attrition in Ukraine, as
JumpCrisscross pointed out above. The Russians have not considered themselves limited by causalities, while the Ukrainians have to conserve manpower and materiel. So the Russians can "afford" to throw a bunch of squads out along a front, and if 90% or more are casualties, they don't care, so long as they can take some ground. Then, once they do, they rinse, lather, and repeat. It's a hideous expenditure of human lives, but it has worked tactically. Whether it is a significant gain operationally or strategically, I don't know. (Russia is going to pay a price down the road for losing all those young men, but it won't be paid by the old men sending them to their deaths.)
The Soviets in WWII used human waves against the Nazis. (EDIT: They did not, they used them against the Finns in the Winter War.) That said, the USSR was capable of combined-armed warfare.
Russia has proved incapable of combined-arms warfare. They launched human waves in Bakhmut, and are largely using numerical advantages in raw recruits to push for marginal gains. This isn’t how a modern army fights.