Quote (Black XistenZ @ Apr 1 2022 03:15pm)
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.
Send their best troops to do what? To clear densely populated urban areas where literally every apartment building can have snipers picking your soldiers off? Where these apartment buildings can have claymores, and other booby traps? Where western tank busters can basically neutralize armor for little gains? To gain what exactly? It would be an absolute nightmare and would result in a tremendous amount of deaths for Russia, we've already seen that with certain cities there. That's why they parked their armor outside of many cities and after thinking it over in places like Kiev just decided to abandon that strategy.
It's too costly, and whatever gains are probably not worth it. Their strat now seems to basically keep what they took and force Ukraine to talks, while consolidating the south and east.
edit: They failed on some objectives but succeeded on others. Ukraine's armed forces are largely in shambles now, so any offensive on the Donbass is likely to fail, we already know Ukraine conceded NATO membership. To me, imo those are two things they didn't have before the war.
This post was edited by ofthevoid on Apr 1 2022 02:38pm