“And that may make the Russian leadership temper their plans.”
Not a lot, if any. The Russians have already weighed the possibility of local resistance. They can go into a city as big as Kiev and almost treat it like a police enforcement possibly using tear gas. The Russians do not have a protective mask that does a good job with tear gas and the PMK-3 was first issued to their army in 2014. Not the TDF. Unless she found a mask and has a new set of filters, she is helpless as the old ones have deteriorated by now. Plus as she is not a member of anything that resembles a formattable force to a trained and postured and well armed Russian army, they probably have very few of the masks anyway.
“reading only literally”
Don’t read into this article that they are a fighting force. They aren’t if they are being required to supply their own weapons, uniform, and food at their expense. The men at Normandy were a trained force of 156,000 men and were well armed, to go into 50 miles of beach with plans that were generated over a couple of years.
Initially, a plan called “Operation Sledgehammer” called for an Allied invasion of ports in northwest France as early as 1943, but Roosevelt and Churchill decided to invade Northern Africa first and attack Europe’s “soft underbelly” through Italy. A year before the actual attack at Normandy. The TDF takes a whole two weeks to train their “soldiers.”
According to the D-Day Center, the invasion, officially called “Operation Overlord,” combined the forces of 156,115 U.S., British and Canadian troops, 6,939 ships and landing vessels, and 2,395 aircraft and 867 gliders that delivered airborne troops.
The Allies used fake radio transmissions, double agents, and even a “phantom army,” commanded by American General George Patton, to throw Germany off the scent.
Since Operation Overlord was launched from England, the U.S. military had to ship 7 million tons of supplies to the staging area, including 450,000 tons of ammunition.
This is not the TDF and comparing the two is not even close. The TDF will not be a problem and are going to take more casualties than the allies at Normandy if they resist. This is not a war Russia is fighting. For them it is an armed intervention to recover lost territory. And using an attack force to cause destruction of property and people of over 3 million, is not outside their capacity. The Ukrainians are toast if they are depending on the TDF.
wy69
The size of Ukraine’s armed forces, which maintains a 255,000 man force, is the third-largest in Europe after the Russian and French Armed Forces.