I does appear that Putin thought he could walk through Ukraine, but miscalculated to a massive scale.
If he had gone for kherson and Donbas things might have been different.
What concerns me is even if Ukrainian offensive is wildly successful Russia will not quit, and this will go on for years.
Not even sure the removal of Putin will change this. The enemy we know as compared the enemy we don’t…
From what is see the Russian public or at least the higher ups are a blood thirsty lot and their mindset is something hard to comprehend
A conclusion I came to after many deployments to the Middle East and what I see as one of the biggest problems at least as far as US is concerned is that we tend to project our values on others
Example. Why when the despots that were controlling iraq, Libya and Afghanistan didn’t the people rise up and support democratic ideals….
Answer they have no history of that, but when told that people often go nah it’s something else
And when we we see Russian grandmas and mothers saying kill all Ukrainians and we can make more children to send to the front we naturally say they must be spouting propaganda. Don’t be so sure their mindsets are mostly not the same. Even those who fled Russia to avoid draft are not exactly condemning the war, they just did t want to die for it
Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking comment
we need to tell ourselves the truth about putin/russia AND the russian people