This whole war has been a mess due to Putin's illogical political decisions, so you aren't wrong on what you are saying
I am sorry, but that’s just typical western MSM gaslighting propaganda at work.
The primary reason Russia rushed the initial phases of the war was due to the threat of NATO intervention.
The greatest risk for Putin was that NATO would actually grow a pair and rush in rapid reaction ground troops to stare down the Russian advance and essentially dare them to start WWIII. Putin might have been prepared to roll the dice and bet that Biden will fold, but China might not have been willing to bet the proverbial farm on it. Without full, albeit behind the scenes, Chinese economic support, Russia could not without western sanctions.
Thus he could not afford to do a methodical minimal risk and loss conventional strategy to push slowly from west to east, and instead had to make the initial rushes to secure the bare minimum amount of territory that is needed to make the whole Ukraine invasion worthwhile.
The secondary objective of the direct threat to Kiev was to pin down a sizeable proportion of the Ukrainian military and more critically, redirect the a significant share of NATO supplied weapons to Kiev rather than have it all go the actual frontlines where the bulk of the fighting and dying was happening.
The poor show from the Russian military in the field could hardly be blamed on Putin.
The only strategic ‘mistake’ that might be reasonably attributed to Putin was the softy softly brotherly war approach. That might be true, but in hindsight, that aspect may well have been deliberately overblown by all sides. By the west to discredit Putin personally, and by the Russians to humanise him.
But I suspect the main reason there wasn’t a shock and awe style mass bombardment of the Ukrainians was simply because the VVS lacked the actual ability to mount such large scale and sustained air strikes.
The first day of war strikes were probably as shock and awe as the VVS could manage, and they needed to take a few days off to recover afterwards at that.
It is clear now that the bulk of the VVS geared primarily for air combat against NATO, and the Russians criminally under invested in key support assets and systems like AWACS, ISR, drones, targeting pods and above all else, air launched PGMs.
The bulk of the Russian PGM strikes are coming from naval cruise missiles, Iskander launchers and attack helicopters.
The VVS are reduced to lobbing iron bombs with Su34s, Su30s and Su35s and essentially gifting the Ukrainians kills against those premium aircraft they should have no business threatening.
Even during the early 2000s the PLAAF was better prepared for ground strike with its JH7 and Su30MKK fleets since China actually purchased the bulk of Russian made PGMs with its MKK orders.
But I digress, the point is that Putin could hardly be blamed for not launching the kind of massed air strikes the VSS is simply unable to deliver.
Now the big strategic shift is happening because NATO has shown it has no balls to get involved directly, so the Russians can now take their time. They are pulling their forces from Kiev to reinforce and consolidate their numbers in the west and to ease their well documented logistical problems (again, hardly something you can blame on Putin).
I suspect another reason for the total withdrawal of the Kiev force is that Russia is going to reverse its massed watered down BTG rollout mistake and reconstitute it’s forces into as many proper BTGs as it can cobble together, with the remaining being reconfigured back to more traditional configurations for conventional battle.
Thus we should actually see the Russians start to fight more competently and coherently, with proper BTGs doing BTG stuff of spearheading breakthrough manoeuvre attacks to cut off enemy forces to form cauldrons, while the conventional army does conventional army stuff of general advance under massed artillery fire to annihilate the Ukrainian forces thus trapped.
It will be a much slower and ‘boring’ grind in that I would expect the Reddit live updates to start drying up as they run out of stuff they want to film and upload, and/or the people doing the filming and uploading start to get systematically annihilated by the Russians. But that’s the kind of stuff the Russians excel at.
