I think people may have let the western media outlets get to their heads, instead of assessing the situation objectively. Russia’s military was not prepared at the start of the invasion and bungled it, but that doesn’t mean everyone in Russia is a bungling incompetent Slav.
It seems like Russia has been incompetent with their advances when in reality modern warfare has just swung the pendulum to defense having a massive advantage, with precision guided ammunitions and remote mine laying. So we’re experiencing a conflict much closer to a WW1 attritional conflict rather than a concentrated armor and movement based mechanized warfare of WW2. It’s only now some people will start waking up to this fact now that they see Ukraine isn’t just smashing through Russian lines like they hoped, and how the media has been portraying the offensive to be for the past 6 months.
Thing is that most people have an incredibly superficial understanding of what’s actually happening in the war. One common argument that’s been going around is that Russia is failing because Russia hasn’t been capturing territory. The reality is that Russia spent half a year now building in depth layered defences and mine fields while depleting Ukrainian air defences.
It’s pretty clear that Russia expected Ukraine to go on offensive sooner or later, and chose to prepare for that instead of wasting their resources trying to take territory they couldn’t control. Now, we see Ukraine suffering horrific losses while failing to gain any momentum in their offensive. Once the offensive burns out, Ukraine will not be able to easily replace their troops and equipment that the west managed to cobble together for them. That’s likely when Russia will start going on an offensive of their own.
What’s interesting is that while mainstream media keeps feeding people propaganda, actual military people in NATO understand what’s happening. This is an insightful read from a U.S. Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin retired after 20 years of service, including eight years as an armor officer with four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and 12 years working as a modeling and simulations officer in NATO and U.S. Army concept development and experimentation.
https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukraine
