Analysis: Military experts agree Vladimir Putin bungled the initial stage of the conflict and that the Russian military has so far performed well below expectations | KnottMatthew
While announcing the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, Vladimir Putin issued a simple request to the members of Ukraine’s military. In short: give up before the war had even started.
But not this time. Regardless of how the conflict ends, there is broad agreement among military experts that Putin bungled the initial stage of the conflict and that the Russian military has so far performed well below expectations. Lockyer said all indications suggest Putin believed Russian troops would quickly seize key airports, allowing Russian reinforcements to land by plane and subdue the Ukrainian government in Kyiv. The 190,000-odd Russian troops stationed around Ukraine’s borders would then enter the country not as active fighters but essentially as peacekeepers.“That would explain why Russian soldiers don’t seem to have been prepared for the fierce resistance they are confronting,” Lockyer says.
As Russian defence minister in the early 1990s, Grachev infamously boasted that a single Russian paratrooper regiment could storm Grozny, the Chechen capital, in two hours. Instead, the war in Chechnya stretched on over two years and resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. David Deptula, a retired US Air Force three-star general who once commanded the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, said he was surprised that Russia didn’t work harder to establish air dominance from the start.
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