Moscow says it will keep pushing its offensive in Ukraine, though NATO doubts Russia has the resources to make a significant breakthrough.
NATO’s top military officer has said Russia’s armed forces are incapable of any major advance.
“The Russians don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough,” NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe Christopher Cavoli told reporters on Thursday.
“More to the point, they don’t have the skill and the capability to do it; to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage,” the general said.
Not a Russia simp, I’ve been watching this war with some interest, and I’ve got a friend whose only hobby at this point is following this war.
If you look at how much Russian military ops have changed across almost every consideration over the course of the war, it’s really a stark difference between where they are today and where they were two years ago. It’s pretty clear Russia totally bunglefucked the opening maneuvers in the war. They’ve had to learn a lot of lessons and learn them hard, and they’re still learning them, but they are learning. I definitely think that Russia really did expect this was going to be a cakewalk, and that they were going to force Kiev into negotiations or else kill Zelenskyy in the first week. I can’t be 100% sure what the Russian military leadership was expecting, but I seriously doubt it was this.
They’re learning a lot at the top level but the bottom level are more untrained than they have ever been. most new soldiers are given a week of “training” a rusty old rifle with and handful of ammunition and are sent to the front.
Their professional army is gone.
Their tank stocks are severely depleted
They can’t fly their air force anywhere near the front for fear of it being shot down.
Their losses in the last couple weeks carving about 10 square km of kharkiv have been dizzying. Ukraine was reporting almost 1600 russians removed from the battlefield the other day and that was just for that day
I feel it’s been common knowledge since after the first month of the war that Russia has miscalculated significantly. They sent in paratroopers, some of the most time consuming and most expensive soldiers to train, into Kyiv where they were summarily killed or captured with no support. Other units ran out of ammo and fuel, with soldiers indicating they weren’t expecting to invade.
Every day this war lasts is a spit in the face to Putin and his shitty planning.
My buddy is on the side of the Russians in all this (we’ve agreed to disagree) and even he admits that the Hostomel airport wasn’t anything else but a disaster. But it did give us one of the funniest moments in the whole war (so far), when a war journalist approached a Russian soldier to ask when he thought the Russians would be arriving.
Just curious, what the heck does your good friend say to justify the Russian invasion? (Edit: apparent stroke when I first wrote this)
So, he feels that the Nazi gangs in East Ukraine were engaging in ethnic cleansing against Russian speakers / Russian nationals that was more or less state sanctioned by the state showing they weren’t interested in doing anything about it. He fully believes Russia’s stated purpose in all this is to seize control of East Ukraine in order to stop the Nazis.
Imo, there’s clear enough evidence that there’s a Nazi problem in Ukraine. What isn’t clear to me is why that’s a reason for Russia to expand its territory (spoiler alert: it’s an excuse, obviously. Russia also has a Nazi problem, like a lot of other countries. The northern hemisphere is working through some shit ATM.)