Maybe it only feels like months and wasn’t but, it feels like the build up on the boarder was going on for a long time. Then, weeks of announcements that they were pulling back, but were not actually pulling back. It certainly felt obvious then that they were going to invade. With some rose colored glasses hoping they would not.
Perhaps it’s a perception thing that all that time wasn’t enough and was still a surprise of sorts.
Because, it certainly didn’t feel like a surprise in the lead up, but more like an inevitability that it was coming. Right down to news stories about the timing of mud season dictating the timeframe.
Perceptions of the passage of time have certainly been messed up the last two years, both with stuff being farther back or closer to now than it really was.
There are reports/rumours that Putin kept the invasion planning within a very tight circle. Most of the officer corps reportedly thought that they really were only conducting exercises and mounting a show of force to intimidate Ukraine, so they didn’t make any preparations for invading.
The logistical challenges of keeping armies supplied and fed were well known in Russia long before WWII—that was the main reason Napoleon lost 99% of his troops during his disastrous 1812 march on Moscow. The vast majority of those soldiers weren’t done in by enemy fire, they were done in by cold and starvation.
In fact one of the reasons that modern food canning techniques were developed was because Napoleon offered a 12,000 Franc reward to anyone who could devise a better way to preserve food for transport.
From what I’m reading, no one else in the government knew they were doing anything other than amassing along the border to put pressure on Ukraine (and NATO/EU), though. The military thought they were doing training exercises and were completely taken by surprise by orders to cross the border, etc. Putin may have been planning this for months or even years, but he seemingly never told anyone in his government, so the actual planning that needed to happen on multiple levels of government never occurred. In fact, according to that supposed FSB analyst, this was a scenario they explicitly didn’t plan for.
Plenty of recent examples of exuberant leaders with overexaggerated notions of their own power and fantastical ideas about the response of an invaded nation to their ‘liberators’. At least two major examples of such invasions with no coherent plan or exit strategy that I can think of in the last 20 years.
In both cases the invasions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, many thousands of invaders, staggering cost and ultimate failure of all objectives combined with what amounts to a retreat in disgrace.
Those two were done with the most advanced and well funded military in human history, and failed utterly at great cost. I see no reason to think that Russia’s attempt to emulate such catastrophically stupid behaviour will end better.
What they learned in WWII was to rely on US made trucks. The Germans were even worse at logistics than the Soviets. For the Nazis, creating a transportation system for mass murder was easy, keeping troops well equipped and fed, not so much.
In Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Syria, they utterly failed at maneuver and conventional efforts at bringing troops to bear and occupy territory. So they resorted to bombing all signs of civilization flat and calling it a day.
They are threatening such actions, but it is harder to pull off in Ukraine. Ukraine is physically bigger, far more visible for the rest of the world and there is a need to keep it relatively intact. Russia does not want to create a large insurgency which can run amok on Russian soil it actually cares about.
POSSIBLE ENDGAME: was never meant to “win” – entire exercise is about inflicting pain and instilling fear. Also, general geo-political destabilization in the hope of drawing Biden “in” and springing some sort of trap to embarrass him and make him appear weaker. Basically, ANYTHING to further the chances of ANY republican, preferrably Trump, getting elected in 2024 and make things easier on Putin in the longer run.
This is an artifact of portrait-mode recording on a mobile device. It’s pretty common these days, unfortunately.
That’s especially true since the autocrat responsible for this mess has a boatload of nukes that he’s already been hinting at. Bad case scenario is he takes out Kiev with one of them. Even worse is most of west Ukraine. And it only goes down from there. This is pretty freakin scary right now.
And this misadventure seems to have been enacted without any of the support or forecasting that the others got… It’s one thing to publicly claim, “they’ll greet us as liberators and we’ll be out in a couple months” while setting up long-term logistical support, it’s another to delude oneself into thinking it’s true, despite all evidence, and entering into a war with no logistical support whatsoever, to the point where things start falling apart in a matter of days, and having no coherent goals. (Even if Ukraine had greeted the Russians as liberators, then what? There wasn’t even a plan for that.)
It’s looking like this is going to result in a disaster of such epic proportions for everyone involved (and maybe for a lot of countries not currently involved) that it’ll make the last 20 years of war crimes look like successful humanitarian efforts in comparison. I’m just hoping that Putin doesn’t drop any nukes, the way some analysts think might happen…
It crossed my mind two or three days in that Putin’s game might not be anything more than “chaos is a ladder” and he thought might as well roll the dice. Even in this lousy situation he finds himself in, he has options to advance his agenda.
You’d think the russians would remember the lesson of Stalingrad, especially given that they TAUGHT that lesson: you can’t conquer a city or a country when you give the population itself every reason to stay and fight. You can grind it to paste, but even then you can’t win: the populace will hide in the paste and keep fighting. As soon as they did the ‘look, we’ve got you surrounded, no escape’ to ukraine, they lost. The fake ceasefires that end in refugees being gunned down, the invitation for refugees to flee, either on routes sending them to russia or into minefields, all this just cements in the mind of the ukrainian people that they might as well die at home rather than die fleeing. It’s just a cherry on the top of this shit sundae that the invaders are invading with korean war era gear, expired rations, insufficient ammo, low fuel tanks, etc.
Why is it people are so much more willing to believe that Putin has some sinister master plan than that he knows a lot about intimidating and lying to his own country but not much about invading another one? He’s just a shameless thug who doesn’t care about human life.
America just had one of those, and people kept wondering if he was less than the obvious pit of stupidity he seemed too. He wasn’t.
