RVInit wrote: ↑Mon Feb 28, 2022 1:51 pm
I have a very uneasy feeling about what is really going on here. Russia should have been able to just destroy Ukraine on Day 1, 2, or maybe even take 3 days. I am having increasingly foreboding thoughts that Russia and generals have been deliberately making bad choices and sacrificing in order to build a false sense of security and false sense of Ukraine's ability to fend them off.
Yeah, I am really wondering what happened there. The invasion seems so badly miscalculated that it feels really wrong.
The Russian military has always had issues with being a bit of a patronage system, and as Putin has been getting more paranoid and wagon circling over the decades, it is possible that between purges and promotion of loyalists, the current military brass and planners really are that incompetent. Russia has been really big lately on the appearance of strength, but even before the invasion there was a lot of speculation about how much of a paper tiger they were. I have also seen speculation that this was all on a politically defined time table that they just couldn't meet.
But yeah, some of the mistakes here are really baffling. Invading a weaker country via your own borders is a best case scenario when it comes to planning and logistics, there is no excuse for having trouble keeping troops supplied over such short distances from your own network.