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Notes -
It's often forgotten, but Ukraine was fighting a low-intensity conventional war against Russian proxies for eight years before the big Russian invasion in 2022, which put a lot of pressure on their military to sort itself out. The ZSU performed quite poorly in 2014, IIRC. Meanwhile, Russia basically sabotaged its own military reforms. The result was that their plans combined both strategic and operational incompetence, leading to the disastrous early days of the war. Russian planners assumed Ukrainian resistance would disintegrate and the Ukrainian state would collapse. They were operating on delusional assumptions about how Ukraine would react and what their own forces were capable of. At least at the outset of the war, Ukrainian troops appear to have been qualitatively superior, and while Russia had (and has) a number of capabilities Ukraine can't match, they didn't have the intel to use them effectively.
To compare and contrast, the US appears to have had similarly delusional strategic expectations, but can at least lean on the fact that the US military is really good at the nuts and bolts of combat while Iran has fairly limited ability to come to grips with the US and is way behind qualitatively. I don't know if this is a function of corruption or just the inherent deficiencies of a regime of globally isolated religious fanatics more concerned with internal security than defense.
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