Nadavegan said:

Quote:

Kiev was never the objective. By attacking Kiev quickly and then retreating slowly, Russia caused a certain amount of Ukraine forces to engage far away from the true objective in the south. Rather than being a "paper tiger", I would say this strategy was quite clever.

If it was a feint it was poorly executed, no military wants to have whole elite units basically destroyed like VDV was. I think it was a decapitation / regime change attempt. A gambit that depended heavily on highly competent manuever warfare. They miscalculated the amount of resistance and their own capability to pull it off. They have now switched to a firepower and attrition march through eastern and southern Ukraine and they are doing very well at it. They had similar issues in chechnya and Georgia and I think there was some legitimate surprise that their military hadn't made more progress in executing combined arms operations.

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