He sure did. The whole invasion has been a mystery to me -- it just didn't make any sense why he was doing it, from the start. But now he's shown the whole world that the Russian military is a joke, and over what?!
“The whole invasion has been a mystery to me — it just didn’t make any sense why he was doing it, from the start.”
From the Russian point of view it makes a lot of sense. Russia is rotting from the inside out. Their population is shrinking, their empire is gone, other than oil and gas they have no industrial base to speak of, and the government is utterly corrupt and has been for generations.
They see themselves as surrounded by former vassal states that view them, quite righteously, with not only deep suspicion but outright hatred over the half century of brutal oppression the Russians inflicted on them.
They are incapable of looking inward at this point. So they have to push this insane fantasy that they’re surrounded by Nazis who want to strip them of their natural resources. Never mind that’s already happening to them by the gangsters running Russia.
They’re utterly convinced that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent country free of Russian domination.
Add to that the fact that Russian society is built on lies and has been for over 100 years. Everyone lies to everyone else about virtually everything. This applies in spades to their military. Lieutenants lie to Captains, Captains lie to Majors, Majors lie to Colonels, Colonels lie to Generals, and the Generals lie to Putin who in turn lies back to them.
Toss in that since the fall of communism everyone has been stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down including military hardware and you’ve got a nearly perfect storm. Every readiness report, training report, and inventory report were lies. It’s why the tires on their vehicles failed in the field. It’s why they can’t get fuel for their tanks, it’s why the rations for their troops are decades out of date, and it’s why their soldiers are utterly unprepared for real combat.
So when an equally corrupt neighbor one tenth their size not only holds out against them but inflicts a staggering number of casualties on them they literally can’t process it.
This is a very dangerous time. Putin is becoming increasingly desperate. And desperate people react in wholly unpredictable ways.
L
“He sure did. The whole invasion has been a mystery to me — it just didn’t make any sense why he was doing it, from the start. But now he’s shown the whole world that the Russian military is a joke, and over what?!”
It’s the problem with rulers who have been in power too long. The longer they are in office the more disconnected from reality they become and they start to believe their own propaganda.
Putin believed that the Russian Army was the vaunted force his generals told him it was and had no way of knowing the trucks didn’t have tires.
While I may not agree with it, I can see the Russian logic in the whole affair. The thing that gets me is that on paper, Russian could have rolled up Ukraine in a week, or so. As it is, they used 2nd tier troops and executed a poorly made plan, with a fraction of their troops, and limited their attacks. All in a misguided attempt to mitigate international backlash. So here they are 2 1/2 months later, bleeding men and equipment in arguably a worse position than when they started. All this, with the specter of losing in several different ways looming over it all.
Military history is replete with ill-advised military adventures.
Truth is that most of the world’s armies are little more than constabulary forces that would crack under the strain of real combat. The real professional armies tend to be smaller, better trained, politically reliable and highly-expensive to maintain. That’s a combination that most countries can’t afford.
According to a report from Bellingcat, Sergey Beseda, head of the Fifth Service (section of the FSB, dedicated entirely to monitoring the political, social and political climate within the former Republics of the Soviet Union, like Ukraine) managed to convinced Putin he had succeeded in raising a huge and highly effective domestic insurgency within Ukraine. He took that money and deliberately lied to Putin for the sole purpose of lining his own pockets. Putin took everything Beseda told him as the truth.
The deception seems to have begun quite soon after the seizure of Crimea. Beseda and his cronies told Putin what he wanted to hear, believing Putin would never act on any of it. Beseda’s partners in crime were greedier and less disciplined than their boss, however, and as time went on, it seems the fictions became ever grander and more fanciful.
The insurgents had multiple hidden stockpiles of weapons, emergency food, ammunition - all paid for from the Fifth Service’s budget. Putin refunded them the outlay and they went and spent the money on flashy lifestyles. in fact, a lot of Russia’s kackhanded logistics at the start of the invasion can probably be explained by the fact that they genuinely believed the logistical supplies were already in place.
At Hostomel, on day one of the invasion, VDV soldiers were running around the runway buildings going “What’s going on? Where’s or welcome? Where are the partisans? How are we supposed to secure this on our own?”
Maybe he really is dying and thought it is now or never?