I wouldn't call crowds of people large enough that the cops arresting a small number and ending up with thousands of people a "small protest" nor would I call the soldiers I've seen surrendering in Ukraine eager and excited to do this and you're also somehow ignoring literally every other protest I've seen outside of Russia.
Are you inside Russia and subjected to the wildly inaccurate version of events which state controlled media there is propagating by any chance?
fire at a potential nuclear bomb)
ARGH
Every sharpshooter on the planet lined up optimally with enough weaponry with sufficient throw weight all waiting to fire at the exact same time could NEVER produce a prompt critical event by firing at a nuclear power plant.
Every artillery and rocket unit possessed by Russia firing at the same part of a nuclear power plant at the same time could NEVER produce a prompt critical event by firing at a nuclear power plant.
You have to either get a sufficiently enriched slug fired into a sufficiently enriched target, or implode a sufficiently enriched sphere of plutonium accurately enough that the fission chain proceeds faster than the whole thing blows itself apart, and IF you do that you've still only got a low to high kiloton range fission bomb. You've gotta figure out how to use THAT to implode a bunch of fusion fuel with shit like x-ray baths for a hydrogen soup or formed shock fronts or any number of other methods involved in a thermonuclear weapon to get the big megaton numbers.
If you hit a nuclear bomb WITH a bomb it is going to blow it apart and scatter the enriched material around rather than set it off, these are nothing like a sensitive high explosive (though some do use those, they have to be triggered accurately in the right sequence) where blowing it up with a small bomb makes a bigger bomb, it makes a radioactive mess for sure, but no earth shattering kaboom.
If you dropped a MOAB on a freaking nuke power plant you're going to make a radioactive mess at best, but you will NEVER get any sort of nuclear explosion from even the worst designed plant, the stuff that makes big booms isn't good at making power, and vice versa. You can get a steam explosion, you'll scatter radioactive material all over the place like an asshole, but there is absolutely zero chance anybody could ever "set off" a nuclear power plant like even the smallest nuclear weapon.
Steam explosions full of radioisotopes DO have the nasty effect of carrying nasty shit high into the atmosphere and letting wind drop it all over the place, which is why Chernoby/Fukushima were bad.
Basically any time you see "nuclear power plant" you should mentally insert "steamy box of hot rocks" instead of "basically a nuclear explosion waiting to happen" and I wish more people had done this all along so we would have moved to a nuclear heavy grid, choking the remaining petrostates in their cribs, instead of people listening to fearmongering anti-nuclear morons.
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As for the issues in the northern parts of Ukraine, something they call "mud season" basically started, all the convoy vehicles you see with tires instead of treads can generally be assumed to use self-inflating systems so they can control the tire profile on the fly, stiff and high riding for roads, squishy for muddin' around, right?
Well, those vehicles need to be rotated so you don't get months and months of sunlight hitting the same parts of the tires, you need to check the air lines periodically, and said tires need to be replaced if they've sat too long or else they'll work fine in road mode and rip across their sidewalls the first time you drop the pressure and try to slog through a muddy field.
Trying to zerg rush a city while being constrained to roads (and thus known routes) is not a smart move.
Trying to do said rush with a single echelon of forces means defensive forces can let you pass and come around to your sides and behind you, which is also not a smart move.
Trying to "denazify" a country with an ethnically jewish president and in the process BOMBING A HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL is an amazingly stupid fucking move.
Putin did a good job projecting this idea that he knew what the fuck he was doing for years, because he is a stupid old racist piece of shit grandpa now. Here's hoping his oligarchs get sick of him and accidentally give him the wrong tea.