Quote (ofthevoid @ 1 Apr 2022 15:08)
Maybe, or maybe they just aren't willing to go balls-deep into this conflict so as to exhaust themselves militarily. I personally think the calculus is the long-game. Why would I fall into the NATO trap of having my military depleted and spent on a war in Ukraine when if war breaks out with NATO, that's the real war for survival.
Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ 1 Apr 2022 15:16)
I think the calculus was originally the short game because they thought it would be easy then they realized they weren't prepared for this conflict in the slightest and had to switch gears to a war of attrition.
I just don't think this argument has any merit. Particularly if Russia expected a blitz, there's no reason to not go for a shock-and-awe strategy where they send their best troops and their most modern equipment into Ukraine, win the war in a few weeks and leave the West shaking at the sight of the mighty and seemingly greatly modernized Russian army. If they had better troops, why hold them back and risk pictures of T-72s (lol) being towed away by Ukrainian farm tractors? If Russia was afraid of a military conflict with NATO, this would be all the more reason to try to project as much strength as possible!
Holding their best troops back only makes sense if they expected a war of attrition that grinds to a standstill from the get go - but if that had been the course of the war their strategists expected, there would have been no reason to start this kind of war in the first place.
There's only two logically consistent explanations for what went down so far:
1. They expected to win this war quickly and decisively with aging equipment and poorly trained, poorly motivated conscripts, deliberately holding back their best troops because they thought they wouldn't need them.
2. The Russian army is indeed a paper tiger and what we're seeing is indeed (close to) the best they can do.
Explanation #1 would represent a historic amount of hybris and misreading of the strategic situation. I have a hard time believing that the Russian military leadership is THAT incompetent. Explanation #2 assumes a far lower degree of incompetence by the Russian side: they overestimated their capabilities somewhat, underestimated the Ukrainian resistance somewhat and their offense got stuck as a result.