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Notes -
On its face, and from my comfy armchair, consuming my western news, the invasion of Ukraine seems like such a colossal waste of human lives and military power.
When I think about other recent conflicts, the ones that come to mind were also incredibly wasteful, but they make sense to me in a way that the Ukraine war does not (maybe because I'm not russian?). The recent examples that come to mind are the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the American defense of South Vietnam. These were arguably also very wasteful but maybe not on the scale of the Ukraine war. Are these good analogies for the war in Ukraine?
My initial ideas relate to the idea that Russia had a lot of military power that was sitting around unused and a bunch of petro income that made any sanctions less meaningful. Maybe the invasion/war hasn't actually been costly? Perhaps Russian leaders (and the hawks among them) saw nationalist fracturing of the tech supply chain coming anyways and this just accelerates it?
What does Russia get for the tremendous expenditure of resources in the invasion and following conflict? Is there some piece of context that helps the invasion make sense to a westerner?
The invasion makes more sense if you consider the underlying assumptions at the start of the conflict. Everyone expected the Russian army to roll up the entire country in a matter of weeks if not days. Furthermore, America hadn't sanctioned Russia in any meaningful way after the 2008 invasion of Georgia or the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and it was unclear whether Europe, let alone the world, would go along with anything more sweeping in the event the US tried to do something. It was assumed that Germany's dependence on Russian gas, not just for energy but for the feedstock of its chemical industry would leat to a split in NATO that could potentially be exploited later. All of these assumptions turned out to be wrong, and Putin didn't seem to have had a contingency for the possibility that he wouldn't be able to take Kiev.
Everyone meaning who? The underlying assumptions of who? Many non-western commentators didn't make these assumptions or claims.
The only way this would have been true given the invasion force was for the Ukrainian government to totally collapse. Many people did not think the Ukrainian government would immediately collapse. If anything, such claims from entirely Western sources evidenced their own failures (or ulterior motives) and not some clear outcome absent Russian failure or incompetence. Ukraine had been fortified for 8 years and had raised the largest army in Europe apart from Russia.
If anything, this simply points out how so many fell victim to obvious frame setting by NATO-mouthpieces to portray anything other than something which almost certainly would never have happened as failure and everything since then has been in the same vein.
The western media apparatus' shock and awe campaign was truly a sight to behold and its silliness continues to bear fruit.
absent government collapse, anyone who thinks <30,000 men were going to "take Kiev," a city of ~3m people is not a person worth paying attention to on these matters
how would it seem Putin didn't have a contingency despite having multiple other fronts which immediately took large swathes of land? if he was certain he was going to take kiev in 3 days or whatever with 30,000 men, why did he bother with the other stuff?
What pro-Russian sources or telegrams do you look at?
That's exactly what was expected - governmental collapse. Zelensky flees to the US, local Russian agents placed there beforehand take power, and in the matter of days the population finds itself under the new rule, which is fully controlled by Russia. Of course there expected to be resistance - but not from organized military, but from disorganized bands of poorly armed and poorly organized guerilla fighters, which could be suppressed with overwhelming force. That's why it went so poorly for them once the initial plan failed - some of the troops were "riot control" troops and not military, and the military expected more of "intimidating the guerillas into submission" than "fighting a well-organized military" mission.
It wasn't something that they just dreamed - they took Crimea this way more or less. They expected Ukraine to be harder, but not as hard as it proved to be.
Also, as far as I understand, the Russian leadership was sold a bill of goods about how much support Putin has in Ukraine and how many agents there are placed in key positions in Ukraine, while in reality most of the money allocated to that were stolen, and most of the people Russia bought were either not key people or too cowardly to do anything once the main plan failed. Though some places - like Kherson - were taken pretty easily, and there are still questions to be answered how exactly that happened. And some pretty key people - like the owner of the biggest Ukrainian aircraft engine manufacturer - were indeed working for Russia. So it wasn't total waste, just not as good as it was sold, and thus unable to deliver as promised.
Taking country of 40 million is a lot of work. Decapitating the government is just the part of it. Capturing key strongholds the other part. Controlling the energy infrastructure, the road infrastructure, etc. Even with the collapse it would be a large and complex plan. Russia didn't just intend to destroy Ukraine, it intended to take over - and taking over such a large territory and such a large population is a massive undertaking. Of course they needed a lot if "other stuff" beyond taking Kiev.
I've been following this pretty closely from sources on both sides of the conflict, sources which have proved to make true claims for years, and, frankly, I don't think we have something close to a similar enough view of what happened to really discuss this without getting into bickering "sources" wars about specifics, e.g., the make-up of the <30,000 soldiers in the Kiev push.
The <30,000 soldiers and a few hundred VDV landing at the airport were going to do a decapitation strike, but the entirety of the Russian aeroforce couldn't be bothered to use a single missile to target government leaders? This isn't believable. What is believable is a pinning maneuver to establish a landbridge to crimea if the government collapse didn't happen, except if that is accepted one also has to admit contingency plans.
Ukraine government collapse was a possibility and a hope, it was not a foregone expected conclusion.
Not sure what do you mean here. Russian airforce did quite a lot of strikes. But hitting "the government leaders" isn't as easy as you think - first, you have to know where they are. Second, you need to get there - and these places would be ones of the best protected. Third, you need to actually strike the target - which Russians were consistently dismally bad at, unless the target it "any random residential building in the two-mile radius". Fourth, your strike has to have some effects - and if you saw the actual buildings we're talking about (I did), they are pretty sturdy. Not accounting to what defenses were built in in the soviet times (that I don't know but I am sure there's at least the basement there).
The goal of Russians never was to convince you, so they may have omitted a couple of steps to make it believable to you. They didn't try to carpet bomb Kiev for the chance to hit Zelensky because a) Ukrainians have anti-aircraft missiles and fighters too (which btw Russians declared destroyed but very very soon found out they aren't) and b) they would spend a lot of effort to bomb one place and Zelensky would be in another place. If they had a way to know where Zelensky is at any given moment, they could kill him a hundred of times, because he has been visiting places within direct artillery or missile strike from Russian forces many times. They just didn't know where he is. You, of course, are free to believe whatever makes you feel better.
Yes, of course they wanted the landbridge to Crimea. If they didn't want it, they wouldn't capture it, obviously. But that was one part of the plan. The other was the decapitation. Somehow in your mind, the capturing of the land bridge to Crimea contradicts the decapitation plan, but however I try, I just can't see how.
Speaking of the bridge, btw, the south was where the collapse in parts did happen - that's where the strategy of recruiting local traitors worked the best, and that explains how Russia captured so much territory with almost zero resistance. They expected the same to happen everywhere, but it didn't. So they had to scramble for the plan B - which means mass mobilization, for which their army absolutely wasn't ready (one more proof they didn't expect needing it) - in fact, some in the military now saying if they do another mobilization like that, the army would not survive, because the chaos and disorganization it caused was horrible (for them, of course, for Ukrainians it was what allowed them to stop the Russia's advance).
It was an expected occurrence, though not the conclusion of the war, just the decisive phase of it - the composition and arrangement of the forces all point to it, so does contemporary propaganda, which nowhere nearly mentioned the possibility of year-long exhausting campaign requiring sending entire Russian prison population to serve as soil fertilizer. Everybody - including top generals and the Khuylo himself - expected quick collapse of the governmental structure. They certainly expect the war not end at it, but they expected the war to be won. It could take a lot of time from the decisive moment to the full victory - in WW2, it took several years - but the break had to occur quickly. It didn't, so now they need to conduct the campaign which they didn't expect to have to conduct.
Was there even one attempt at targeting government leaders? Your claim is that Russia had an extensive network of people ready to take over who chicken out, but they couldn't feed adequate enough intel for Russians to engage in a specific strike against government leaders in a "decapitation strike"? Instead, you want to claim the VDV + <30,000 soldiers were them doing this. Or was it the mysterious cowardly agents who were going to rise up but didn't? This isn't a strong argument.
What isn't believable is your argument given what actually happened in the opening stages of the war for the reasons I specified in my comment. It is difficult and yet they didn't try to do it at all. Or are you claiming they did try, but it's hard and they didn't succeed a single time? I haven't seen anything to support that. When I read a breakdown of the things destroyed in the opening stage of the war, none of it was government buildings.
Please read my comments carefully. My argument is the claim Russia thought government collapse was a foregone conclusion because Putin "seemingly had no contingency," is poor because the large force moving to take the land bridge is evidence there was a contingency if the Kiev push didn't arrive to a collapsed government. The contradiction is in the claim I originally responded to in a discussion you injected yourself into.
if memory serves, this was at the end of September (6 months post invasion)
What I saw in the opening month makes me think it was a hope, but would serve as a pinning force for Russians to get into position inside Ukraine if this didn't come to pass, which it did.
Not a successful one. Obviously, I can't know about unsuccessful ones. There were attempts to send attack groups to capture/kill the leaders, but those were stopped way before they could reach their goals. That was the part of the decapitation attempt, yes.
Yes, they had a lot of people who kinda liked Russia, even more people that were willing to take money from Russia, but way less, and not enough people to actually do something for Russia, and not high enough to be able to feed that high level of classified info. I'm not sure why it surprises you. If Putin wanted to capture the US and offered some US people tons of money, probably there would enough people who would take the money. There are people supporting Putin in the US right now. None of them would be able to tell Putin the exact location and schedule of the US president. For that, you need completely different level of access. Russia has some scores there - as I said, they gained a lot on the south basically for free, and has - and still have, on the occupied territories - people glad to work for them. But way not enough to achieve their goals.
Part of it, yes. The VDV's mission was primarily to capture the airports to allow reinforcements to land closer to Kiev, which is the standard Russian strategy, and at which they failed. It is also the standard strategy - not only for Russia - to first capture vital points with small and rapid force and then keep it until the bulk of the force arrives, while denying the enemy coordination and ability to mount any defense. That's why their attack looks kinda spiky if you look at the map - the direction is at major centers, like Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson, Maruipol, Odessa. At those, they had success at Kherson, and after much struggle, Mariupol which by then was undefendable. All others failed.
And the planned size of Russian force was never <30K. It was 150-170K. Of course, only part of it was dedicated to Kiev specifically.
No, it started much earlier. As always, in Russia the official state of affairs and the real state of affairs is much different. At first, as you described, they thought it could be done with small forces and the rest mopped up at leisure. Then they had to involve other army units (remember, they had more than a million at hand, even though obviously they couldn't use them all at once) - initially they publicly promised no enlisted personnel at all will be fighting in Ukraine, only volunteers on contract, since this was not a war, but "special operation". In fact, you could be jailed (maybe still could) just for calling it a war. Then they started "volunteering" other military units. In April, the first summons to reservists started to appear. Those were weakly enforced t first, but for those silly enough to show up, they were pressured to sign "voluntary contracts" with the promise (false of course) that they will be only used as supply units in the rear and never see the frontline. Some were stupid enough to buy it. On May 28 Putin signed an order removing age limits for such recruitment. In June, they started enlisting prisoners. In Donetsk and Luhansk, the mobilization started in February, and by June became compulsory, with frequent manhunts, for any able-bodied man (they surely felt very protected by Putin by then). Most of the mobilized were dead or disabled soon after arriving at the frontlines, because nobody bothered to adequately train or supply them. And only after exhausting all these options, in September indeed, Duma officially passed the law serving as the base for the official mobilization.
Overall, there was a clear expectation at each step that they have enough resources and wouldn't need more, only to need more within the next month or two. Initially, they denied the mobilization would be needed - but with time, they realized this is the only thing that would save them from immediate collapse. Yes, it took time - given severe resource constraints and the vast sizes of the arena (over 1000km battle line). During that time, Russia was persisting in denial that they are at war and that they will need more resources. But gradually they had to recognize it. This does not match the idea that they expected the long at hard campaign from the start - they absolutely did not. They expected a quick win. Then maybe a not-so-quick win. Then maybe a moderately long win. Then maybe a slow win. Then "at least something we could declare a win without losing face". Now they expect maybe at least not lose what they had in 2021. It will get worse for them.
Where, based on what, targeting who and this is proved by what? I have never seen any supporting evidence of anything remotely like this. I have seen lots of evidence of the opposite, i.e., Russians knowing about where government leaders were and not attacking them.
They sent waves of missiles which destroyed important military targets all over the country from Karkov to Lvov. There are countless examples of this. And yet not a single civilian leadership building was destroyed? Your entire claim rests on soldiers attempting, but failing, at targeting government leaders, but I haven't seen good evidence of this.
"Government leaders" != only the President, the most guarded and secretive government leader of any country
Lots of those people could indeed say where mayors were, where deputies were, where representatives were, etc. Difficult? Yes, for some. Impossible for all? No.
I have always been speaking specifically about the Kiev push.
My understanding is that summonses to reservists are a normal part of the operation of the Russian military, absent if a war is going on or not. Is this accurate? Russia's hybrid military system is very foreign to me. In the US, reservists are regularly called up for all sorts of functions and are regularly deployed anyway as normal operation of the military irrelevant of wars or whatever else.
So they received summonses, but then they weren't enforced, and if they did show up then they would sign voluntary contracts despite them being reservists and receiving summonses anyway? What happened if they showed up and didn't sign "voluntary" contracts? Do you have any idea how many people this happened to?
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