The opening ceremony was mediocre though obviously not for the reasons the chuds gnash their teeth. I've binged all the ceremonies back during the pandemic. London 2012 was more of a spectacle even with its typical amnesia of the role of colonialism during its industrial revolution performance, Rio 2016 had much more soul and character, Beijing 2008 is still the unbeatable standard; all of them had a more organized structure than Paris' "tourism ad skit" of Haussmann's old buildings along the Seine. The Parade of Nations is typically meant to give full attention to the athletes and so the constant interruptions to splice in perfomances were obnoxious. I will say that the hot air balloon flame cauldron, reminiscent of those balloons in the old Paris World Fair posters, is a rather unique idea that was also executed fairly well, unlike the boat parade.
The LGBT representation was just one part of Macron's overall rebranding campaign of France's image as an "progressive nation boldly confronting its past" as a theme that permeated the entire ceremony. Seeing that Louise Michel statue description on how she was "exiled to New Caledonia and fought against French colonialism" was quite a satirical display of how superficial Macron's "Brand France" is given the current French colonial occupation and the military troops stationed to squash the still ongoing New Caledonian indigenous protests taking place since May.
I would say that some part of the Russian experience comes from the Soviet campaign in the aid of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. You captured the major Afghan ring road and more or less all the major cities, but then what? The reactionary mujahideen simply retreated to the countryside in the same way the Taliban did following the later American invasion. Funded by American weapons in the same way that NATO now funds Ukraine, the entire strategic paradigm shifts towards an endless defensive slog against counter-insurgency. You can't abandon your own established holdings, the major cities and its peoples, to consolidate properly for both PR/morale and humanitarian reasons and so the conflict is a long bleed. Once an equilibrium is established, you cannot strike out against the mujahideen-occupied countryside without drawing resources used to defend your established urban holdings. The Soviet and US Afghan Wars are examples of how precisely a long war should not be conducted.
The only long war in contemporary history which brutal attrition was the intention is a war that most ML don't study because it's a miserable inter-fraternal conflict between socialist states, the Sino-Vietnamese War.
The primary literature I'll reference is from a Chinese gusano professor, Xiaoming Zhang, who worked for the US Air War College (and ironically was later recently targetted by the FBI China Initiative and subsequently lost his job): "Zhang, X. 2015. Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. University of North Carolina Press." As it was sponsored by the literal US DoD (the first book I've ever read where there's a disclaimer that says: "The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government."), it is obviously ideologically reactionary but because it is meant to provide for the US military an account of PLA strategic planning and thus largely focuses on military analysis, that part is therefore worth reading.
The Sino-Vietnamese War is actually the war in all with the most parallels to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Deng's intentions for the war with Vietnam was principally "attitude adjustment." Vietnam had sided with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet Split and this was seen as a betrayal of China's support in the Vietnam War. It started with an initial invasion that was then, by Vietnamese argumentation, repelled. This is what NATOpedia classifies as the "official" Sino-Vietnamese War and in the Vietnamese narrative, it repelled an invader that was planning to sweep their their way through Hanoi all the way down to the Mekong Delta. But then the conflict kept going on.
As the author writes:
By the conclusion of the border war in 1991-93, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, liberated from the US occupation and unified for over 20 years had still been unable to properly focus on its Doi Moi economic reforms, announced in 1986, due to the ongoing conflict:
The author also makes an allegation of an "agreement" between the two Communist Parties, which is rather interesting in light of the much hyped public Vietnamese antagonism towards China by the West: