Occupying Kyiv means urban guerilla warfare and a lot of civilan deaths.
They don't want to occupy Kyiv, they want to threaten to occupy Kyiv. Which is exactly what this preposterously-slow convoy accomplishes.
How could they possibly hope to get this? A peace accord with demilitarization on the Ukrainian site would only be possible if the Ukrainians trusted Russia. But Russia did not feel bound to their former agreements on keeping Ukraine as a sovereign state. How could Ukraine be guaranteed not to be invaded completely after demilitarizating?
I suspect the plan is to just keep increasing the pressure until this piece of paper materializes.
Maybe at some point Zelensky gets killed by "accident" and whoever takes over signs the piece of paper. Or that guy refuses and he turns up dead. It's a war zone, crazy shit will happen.
I seem to remember a $120 million F35 falling into the South China Sea a couple of weeks back. Easy come, easy go.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/navy-recovers-stealth-35-sou...
Franklin Roosevelt had the Navy's obsolete battleships all parked in Pearl Harbor when war was threatening in the Pacific. The all-important aircraft carriers were far away. Everyone in the US Navy understood how a successful attack would run, because it had been rehearsed twice already by the Navy itself.
Then, Putin will have re-established Ukraine as a vassal, and have a Neo Russian Empire which the Russian population will chauvinistically and enthusiastically accept. 'We have freed the Ukranians' is what they can tell themselves even though clearly the Ukrainians are willing to literally fight to the death indicates otherwise.
Correct in that they don't want to 'occupy' anything, that's expensive. They thought Ukraine would capitulate quickly.
Evidence for this points to the fact Putin had to call up Chechen units, marshall units from far away, get Bealurus soldiers involved, and the fact he's still losing a few aircraft every day and does not have air superiority, which surely he would like to have established.
I doubt that and Zelensky is not really the problem. Go and inform yourself as to what is going on.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/04/how-zelensky-made-peac...
There is a 'Hitler supporter' in every random group of 300 people you can assemble on the planet.
Those 'Angry Nationalists' would not have existed were it not for Putins constant interventions with Yanukovich and then the 2014 invasion.
No Putin intervention -> no Nazis.
FYI Zelenky was is joke, a turd, totally 'the wrong person' - his heroism is due to what he is doing, not what he was. Whatever kind of 'quesitonable leader' he was before, he is now 'Churchill'. He's a figure of history now.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/03/the-universa...
In 2010 or 2012 a large gas supply was found and Crimea was at the center of it.
Putin doesn't like the alternative solution for Europe and moved in to occupy Crimea as fast as possible.
Ukraine cut off water supply to the invaders. They were getting dry. And now he is looking for an excuse to invade a country.
NATO is a defensive measure, not an offensive one.
Putin is a bully that wants to keep his hold over Europe. Nothing more, nothing less.
It might be that the slow-rolled advance on Kyiv is meant to draw units away from the southern front Putin actually cares about.
The Russian’s also wouldn’t park themselves like that. They don’t have air dominance and from the numerous Ukrainian air strikes, it doesn’t seem like they have much idea of what’s above them at any given time. (They’re parked close together to stay under the umbrella of anti-aircraft weaponry.) The longer the convoy waits, the more time the Ukrainians have to prep to shell the convoy or hit it from the air.
This goes for other questions about the campaign. As a large conscript force still basically using the Soviet model, weak troops are often thrown into the fire early on to soften opposition. Likewise, reliance on artillery is a byproduct of the air force being stretched thin and not reinvesting in new equipment: air dominance and precision bombing missions are expensive, and Russia's military primarily focuses on maintaining its own sovereignty, thus most of the allocation is towards a defensive air war with support provided by ground-based rockets and shelling.
However, there are severe challenges still to be reckoned with, which support the idea of Russia remaining on the back foot. The reports of abandoned vehicles, disorganized troops and stretched supplies hold some credence; again, as a conscript army it's harder to pursue delegation of responsibility like a professional force. You are getting relatively less out of more troops simply due to lack of coordination. As well, Ukraine has a smaller force but has been spurred to rearm with the assistance of foreign aid and equipment since the 2014 invasion, getting access to some of the best technologies and training of NATO forces. So Ukraine has some significant battlefield advantages, and with the cutoffs to supply chains on Russia's end, from my viewpoint, while a Russian victory could still occur if they rout the forces in major cities, a slow, protracted conflict will definitely end in Russian defeat at significant cost to civilians. The next weeks will be critical.
1) Objectives were a rapid decapitation strike, air supremacy, and major incursions on several fronts, grabbing several cities.
2) His own forces are getting drawn out and mauled. Ukranians are just not losing units at the same rate.
3) Either way, momentum matters and Russians don't have it.
That said, they do have a lot of fodder to throw at Ukraine.
It seems likely that Ukraine can defend themselves if they are very effectively supported by the West on many fronts, but otherwise the Bear will just slowly suffocate them even as it looses a lot of blood itself.
Every anyone with military experience sees that column they have to be salivating. Has there ever been a time in history when there has been several divisions of units just sitting there, out in the open, waiting to be attacked. My gosh.
It is absolutely possible to get high on your own supply (of authoritarianism, propaganda, and shooting messengers). So it is entirely possible upper echelons of the Russian Military tell Putin what he wants to hear because anyone who doesn't gets an unscheduled dose of Polonium.
It is also possible they are deliberately slow-rolling for various reasons: legitimate supply line issues, testing the waters, being able to pull back if the west responds too strongly, they really just wanted to steal some territory, etc. Being an opportunist is hardly unique.
Perhaps the plan was to invade. If you take the capital within a few days yay: you annexed Ukraine and you'll be done and it will be old news before the west can really respond. If the west sends aircraft carriers and troops you claim you were just protecting ethnic Russians in the border areas. If the invasion bogs down or the economic cost gets too high sign a peace treaty that contains as much as you can get away with and play nice neighbor for a bit while you send in the undercover agents to try another regime change in 5-10 years when everyone has stopped paying attention.
Russia, much like the US, hasn't really faced off against a reasonably modern military with good training and decent weapons systems anytime in the recent past. Even though Ukraine has a smaller military they've been pouring a lot of effort into training, arming, and modernizing since the last time Russian decided to invade and take some territory in 2014. And it wasn't like they were rag-tag religious extremists or a guerrilla force prior to that - they weren't starting from zero.
If Putin and his cronies really did overestimated Russian military capabilities it is still entirely possible for Russia to win the same way the Soviets survived the Wehrmacht: Massive mobilization, throw bodies into the fire, then slowly slog it out for as many years as it takes. That is an option Ukraine doesn't really have. They can't mobilize the same level of industrial production and they can't sustain as many dead sons. No one really knows if top of the line western weapons would level the playing field vs what Russia's defense industry can make.
In the end it might come down to will: does Putin have the will to kill as many Russian soldiers as it takes? Would the rest of his cronies let him if he tried? Will the Russian military accept that? On the Ukrainian side how far are they willing to go? How many citizens will volunteer? How many modern western weapons can they get ahold of? Can they continue disrupting Russian communications and logistics?
As far as I know this is the closest to a true military faceoff using modern weapons and tactics as we've seen. Most recent conflicts have been very asymmetric at every level which doesn't make for apt comparisons.
https://twitter.com/LostWeapons/status/1499040883865391107
, somewhat corroborated by idiotic Lukashenko presentation now, entire operation was supposed to be completed in 15 days.
https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-still-has-significant-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ukraine-russia-war-fighter-...
I still retain connections with my high school mates. A lot of them have parent in military, seamen, and frontier men.
The news of Putin's fiasco is spreading like wildfire among DOSes, ship crews, and in army barracks.
The navy been traditionally the most disciplined service branch of the military because ships almost always have actual officers to command, vs. NCOs in the army.
I can't preclude the possibility of a mutiny brewing there right now, as news of ships crews (yes, not even marine infantry, but actual ship crews, 3 star lieutenants) being forced into trains going to Ukraine came.
It's very hard to figure out what is really going on in Ukraine (though we have a 1/2 decent idea) - let alone how to grasp what Russians all over are thinking.
I would imagine the propaganda is effective at the same time Russians have to be cluing into the fact that this is 'not going well'.
The degree to which they comprehend that up to 1000 armoured vehicles destroyed is definitely a 'giant disaster' is hard to fathom, as few people can put that into context.
And at the same time, they have a lot of blood to spill, and, they know they have a lot of reserves in depth.
The bulk of the US force hadn't even entered Iraq yet.
There was a huge traffic jam at the border — thousands of vehicles parked in parallel rows, nothing but columns of trucks, humvees, oil tankers, flatbed tucks, armored vehicles and vehicles of every stripe, from horizon to horizon.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraqis-surrendering-in-hordes/#...
They need to bridge more distance with not enough resupply trucks. So they wait from a secure distance to resupply the convoy. It's also at important intersections to cut off main roads.
