The Volga River is less than 90 miles from the eastern most border of the Donbas. That river is the conduit for about 5 million barrels/day that head north from the Caspian Sea for distribution at Moscow. There was never any way Russia could allow NATO that close.
Stop thinking of who has moral high ground about what and who is in the wrong and how abused who.
It doesn’t matter.
This is the first war in history where both sides have excellent satellite recon. Advances will always be slow in all warfare of the future. You can do nothing with troop concentrations that the enemy cannot see. Everything can be countered.
It has nothing to do with courage or good vs bad weapons or poor tactics or poor morale. It’s all about recon and it’s not really about much else.
So all the silliness about the Russian convoy being stopped from having no fuel or Chinese tires . . . just forget all that stuff. They certainly had fuel and tires to redeploy, so that absurd story was clearly wrong.
Advance is slow because it has to be slow. If you mass troops anywhere, they will be seen and hit from afar.
No one outside the Kremlin has any idea where Russia will stop its advance. There is a nuclear power plant at a place called Energovar. Russia has it. It is 1/2 the nuclear power of all of Ukraine. Mayor of Metropol has said they will not be giving it back. They will sell power.
Watch that situation. It matters a lot more than hand waving over heads about war crimes.
I am going to disagree with this conclusion. You omit several important factors including air power, logistics, and mobility of forces, as well as an understanding of centers of gravity.
Neither side has obtained air supremacy, or even superiority, though one would think the Russians capable before this started. The Russians failed to use their air power to shape the battlefield for the land invasion, though I’m not sure they would understand what centers of gravity to apply that to.
The northern convoy failure was absolutely both a logistics failure and a failure to understand the geographical defenses, as well as a demonstration of lack of maintenance and spare parts chain. You could almost certainly throw in Soviet doctrine and troop morale into that as well.
The slow grind you see is not the result of both sides being cautious in light of intelligence. It’s that Moscow apparently has no highly mobile forces capable of making targeted strikes at critical centers of gravity, unlike US special forces. This again was not expected from Russia, but it’s what they have demonstrated.
so Russia is fighting WWII tactics against an army 1/10 its size and only advancing at a pace equivalent to fighting Hitlers Germany, while taking huge losses.