Russia threw virtually everything it had at Ukraine this winter and it failed to break Ukraine.
Now what? Russia’s frontline is in tatters, all they can do is fumble for more viral acts of mass terror like hitting water infrastructure.
This new phase of the war will still be brutal, but don’t forget russia is attacking civilians because it is now too weak to fight Ukraine’s military head on. Terrorism is obviously scary but every act of terror is an admission of weakness and a foreclosure of any broader more geopolitically transformative military action.
Russia’s frontline is in tatters, all they can do is fumble for more viral acts of mass terror like hitting water infrastructure.
It’s also exceedingly stupid. We’ve got nearly a century worth of evidence that while you can bomb a country, you can’t bomb a country into surrender.
At least by focussing on one type of infrastructure, you can exhaust supplies and hinder repairs by taxing existing civilian capacity. If you bomb 10 transformers a week and Ukraine replaces 9, you’re at least getting somewhere in the short term. If your weapons cost less than the target, it might even be a good idea to keep going.
But if you shift half your attacks from transformers to water treatment, guess what happens? Suddenly Ukraine catches back up, replacing more transformers AND fixing pumps faster than you can break them.
These are literally lessons from the 1940s. You can go to your nearest bookstore and buy several wheelbarrows full of books on this topic. This is why somewhat smarter nations attack either centralized facilities or military sites. There might be ten thousand people who can install a sewer pump, but I doubt there’s a hundred people who can build radar systems.
When you put it that way, it kinda makes this whole “3 day operation” seem kinda silly and uninformed. Has anyone tried to tell Pooty?
Yes, lots of people. By a tremendous stroke of coincidence all of them suffered tragic window-related accidents or committed suicide by shooting themselves in the back with a rifle.