Quote (thundercock @ Jun 29 2022 01:41am)
The Russians didn't have enough resources to successfully lay siege to Kyiv. They tried to surround the city (Bucha, Irpin, Gostomel, Vasylkiv, etc.) and they tried to reinforce their troops through Sumy and Chernihiv "axes." They tried to do the same to Kharkiv too. At the end of the day, it was a miscalculation on their part and it cost them severely. They lost A LOT of special forces trying to shock Kyiv into submission.
Comparing Mariupol to Kyiv is strange because Mariupol was able to be surrounded due to the Russian Navy and is significantly smaller. We've been saying since early March that for Russia to take Ukraine, they would need at least 500k troops. 100k of those would have to be dedicated to Kyiv alone.
The distinction here is that they didn't try to unsuccessfully storm or siege the city. They backed away without a major engagement. They certainly tried to surround the city, to maneuver large amounts of forces and troops into position, but they just sat there and did not breach the city en masse, nor bombard it with their overwhelming artillery and mass missile strikes. The fighting that did happen was very sporadic and isolated, not even damaging any critical infrastructure. Perhaps capturing the city outright would require more troops than Russia fielded, maybe it would have been possible, I don't think we know, because it wasn't put to the test. But we know they could have flattened Kiev and turned it into a smoking ruin with just artillery or airstrikes, and that wouldn't take 500,000 troops to accomplish, and could be done with conventional weapons as we've seen in the other cities.
So to bring it back to the original point- was it some kind of strategic error, where they planned around a decapitation strike and the abrupt fall of the regime, and had no backup plan, and just reworked their whole strategy on the fly? Or was it a gambit, a low investment into the hope that they could take Ukraine without a fight, a bluff that they would not follow through if the Ukrainians stood their ground?