I'm actually surprised that Russia hasn't taken out the communications infrastructure on day 1. Why would they allow all these ukrainian locals to post videos for viral and grassroots effect on twitter?
How much ground has the Twitter battalions taken for Ukraine again? However, there have been many instances where idiot Redditors doxed Ukrainian troops hiding in schools and supermarkets that directly led to said troops getting deleted by Russian artillery and cruise missiles.
Hitting civilian communications infrastructure doesn’t have much military benefit. If the enemy is reduced to using civilian networks, they got far bigger problems. Keeping the civilian communications intact is above all else to allow effective governance of newly captured territories. How do you expect to govern people if you cannot talk to them?
Similar deal with power. Cut the power and civilians will start to leave. In areas that are overwhelmingly pro-Russia, where do you think that civilian population can go? Through the front lines fighting east to further west?
Russia’s strategy was sound. NATO’s resources and military inventories are finite. Hit them in warehouses and as they move up to the front and eventually NATO will run out of spares they can send without degrading the combat effectiveness of its own troops.
Where the Russian strategy failed is the Russian air forces’ inability to condition deep strike and interdiction against these NATO supply shipments and Ukrainian troop formations over most of Ukraine.
That meant Russia could only effectively strike at warehousing and similar static targets, and were probably finding it harder and harder to find such juicy targets over time as Ukraine started to learn from its earlier mistakes and stopped placing arms caches in urban and obvious places.
That meant Ukraine was able to amass equipment and troops relatively safely to launch major offensives.
Had the Russian Air Force properly invested in a balanced force with proper support equipment and meaningful precision strike inventories, the recent setbacks would never have happened.
I suspect the Iranian drop deal, if it is real, would be an attempt to bandaid this problem. Whereby Russia would be able to start doing deep strikes and supply train interdicts deep in Ukrainian territory with these expendable drones rather than send more flankers to their needless deaths trying to do SEAD and DEAD without the right gear.
