What about the use of donkeys is strange? I've been hearing a lot of ridicule surrounding this the last few days and I don't really get it. Russian army seems to do a lot of weird, inefficient, or baffling things but why are donkeys a sticking point?
US army also used donkeys in places where vehicles were inconvenient in Afghanistan and DARPA spent millions on developing a robotic donkey replacement for those kind of conditions that ultimately failed to be a replacement for the real thing.
At some point it starts to feel like poor propaganda, this conflict has spawned a number of cases of ridicule along the lines of "when their side does X it's because they're too poor/stupid/corrupt to do any different, but when we do X it's because we're clever/ingenious/thrifty". It's borderline absurd to see people falling for the same kind of propaganda they're railing against.