Cait the Proud Trans Woman on Nostr: 4/10 Right. Now forward to Russia, post-Soviet collapse. Putin eventually takes over, ...

4/10

Right. Now forward to Russia, post-Soviet collapse. Putin eventually takes over, and in the service of his growing authoritarian regime, he builds up the myth of invincibility. Russia is destined to be an imperial superpower! Look how we threw back the invaders, twice, to their destruction!

So when Putin starts the open warfare in Ukraine (remembering he’d seized Crimea many years earlier, and the Little Green Men pseudo-invasion of the Donbas and Luhansk regions of Ukraine), he proclaimed that it would be done in three days. They put together a pretty slapdash plan, involving a push on two major fronts: one from Donbas/Luhansk, one towards Kyiv itself, including airborne troops landing at the airport to try and seize it.

Ukraine threw them back from there, pushed right back over the border near Kyiv, and eventually retaking Kharkiv and some other parts. Then the war ground to a more or less halt. The Russians couldn’t push forward any other way than slow, grinding assaults, pouring in men and machines as fast as they could to try and overwhelm the Ukrainian defence.

They managed to make slow, very slow, progress, until even that petered out. Three and a half years into the open phase of the war, they were stalled.

Which is when Ukraine got their strategy working for real.

They had been building up their ability to strike behind the Russian lines, while maintaining the front line as a stalemate. Supply lines were hit, reorg and rest areas were hit, railway lines, junctions, anything they could reach, to push the Russian supply lines to be longer. Frustrated by the restrictions on deep strikes by their weapons providers in the West, they began building their own deep strike assets.