Perhaps Im giving way too much credit to an obviusly mad homicide that is drinking his own KoolAid, but why the botched invasion? Why send barely conscript troops. Russia has professional troops and equipment that could have acomplished the Ukraine take over quickly, or in theory they must have them.
In chess sometimes your opening moves are sacrificing your pawns because they are the most "useless" pieces to lure your enemy into a trap.
From my armchair general seat I can think of a few plausible things that persuaded Putin's logic and current shambles
1. Overestimation of own strength and underestimation of Ukrainian strength. Certainly before this disastrous offensive, the Russian military was esteemed following the successes it had in the 2014 Crimean/Eastern Ukraine invasions and the Syrian civil war intervention. The notion that Russia could be able to overwhelm the Ukrainian mililtary by attacking on three fronts with a vast, mobile and numerically superior force wasn't and still isn't unlikely. No one could see the complete collapse of Russian morale, which coupled with the inverse stiff resolve of Ukrainian military & civilian coming lol, made for a situation where Russian numerical superiority couldn't even be used to its full effect. No point having more soldiers if they don't want to follow orders - the recent reports of Russian marines refusing to assault Odessa is showing that even Russia's elite armed forces don't want to shoot at Ukrainians.
If the Russian armed forces seriously believed in invading Ukraine, they could probably still pull it off. But they haven't even mobilised half of their land forces and
seem incredibly hesitant to use their air force so a considerable sum of Russian power just isn't being deployed. Couple that with the Ukrainian forces already being a tough bunch, and all the foreign equipment and training they've received since 2015 like through Operation Orbital, the Ukrainians are stronger than Putin may have presumed whilst his own forces aren't communicating with each other (elite units have been shot down in areas that were known to be dangerous to other branches of the Russian military), aren't following orders, are willingly leaking information and abandoning equipment to Ukraine e.t.c.
This is legitimately just a complete failure. There is no trap here
2. The conscripts were just there to hold territory after the elite troops gained ground. You need a lot of troops to garrison a city and the conscripts could fill the boots. Of course this never materialised because the elite troops got repelled
*EDIT
Relevant quote:
“The Russians are discovering that coordinating multi-domain operations is not easy,” Deptula told Reuters. “And that they are not as good as they presumed they were.”
This is why transport planes are getting sent into areas not covered by Russian SAMs and getting shot down; this is why Russian vehicles are being sent ahead of Russian air cover and blown up. The air force, army and navy are not at the level of interservice coordination and control comparable to say, the US armed forces
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Topic: Maybe the WWIII thread (soon) (Ukraine) (Read 69191 times)