Vladimir Putin, military SUPERGENIUS

A very bad ending remains possible, but Russia’s military effort thus far has been a complete debacle:

It has been a little over three weeks since Russia initially invaded Ukraine. And by most accounts, the Russian war effort has been a disaster.

The initial Russian invasion plan, a lightning march aimed at conquering Kyiv, collapsed within days. Since then, the Russians have adjusted to a more gradual advance backed by heavy artillery fire, an approach that has allowed them to make some noticeable territorial gains.

But these advances appear to have been halted, at least temporarily. On Thursday, the UK Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that Russia’s offensive “has largely stalled on all fronts,” a judgment echoed by open source analysts tracking developments on the ground. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces have even managed to mount a counteroffensive around Kyiv.

Russian casualties have been horrifically high. It’s hard to get accurate information in a war zone, but one of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the US Defense Department — finds that over 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first three weeks of fighting, a figure about three times as large as the total US service members dead in all 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan.

“We’re seeing a country militarily implode,” says Robert Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies air power.

This is not how the war was supposed to go. On virtually any quantifiable metric of military strength, from defense spending to the size of the respective air forces, Russia’s forces vastly outnumber and outgun Ukraine’s. In early February, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian invasion.

But Russia’s military has proven more incompetent, and Ukraine’s more capable, than nearly anyone anticipated.

“Having spent a chunk of my professional career [working] with the Ukrainians: Nobody, myself included and themselves included, had all that high an estimation of their military capacity,” says Olga Oliker, the program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group.

There are many reasons things have turned out this way. Generally speaking, it appears that pre-war analyses overrated Russia’s hardware advantage and underrated less tangible factors — including logistical capacity and the morale of the front-line combat troops on both sides.

Hmm, I’m not sure I trust an article that quotes obscure academics from public border state universities, but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming. I suspect one major part of the problem is that Putin believed his own bullshit about Ukraine being a fake country, but at any rate this has been a catastrophic blunder by Putin on every level.