I think you mean they're obstinately continuing the invasion they thought would be over in three days. Sending an endless stream of regulars, conscripts, and prisoners against people defending their homeland with drones and secondhand cold war gear.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
Ukraine had a standing army in the hundreds of thousands, numerous heavily fortified front cities, and a substantial chunk of highly motivated 'nationalists' within their armed forces. The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days was completely nonsensical and came from Western official sources, including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] The only time it surfaced in Russian propaganda was from television personalities who were obviously being boisterous and hyperbolic. That the West would publicly release such 'enticing' rhetoric prior to the war itself is interesting.
The war also isn't a stalemate by any interpretation. In the nominal sense Russian forces are making steady progress, most recently having entered into Pokrovosk [2]. But beyond that - war is rarely, if ever, a real stalemate when there are still large scale combat operations playing out. Rather it transforms into a war of attrition, where progress becomes non-linear. Ukraine is in the midst of a severe manpower shortage, but they still have enough forces to competently hold their defensive lines. But at the point that their manpower gets stretched just beyond that point, everything will collapse rapidly. In a way it's vaguely akin to a siege, except the resource under pressure tends to be manpower instead of e.g. food or water.
> The only time [the rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days] surfaced in Russian propaganda was from television personalities who were obviously being boisterous and hyperbolic
The former commander-in-chief of Russian ground forces recently gave an interview in which he said that everyone expected Ukraine to fall within three days, due to severe intelligence mistakes regarding Ukraine that reinforced the belief that 70% of Ukrainians would welcome Russian invaders with open arms. Except: https://bsky.app/profile/wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3m7a...
It could be worth mentioning that this guy had been the commander-in-cheif from April 2012 until December 2013, did not hold any post since then and retired in 2018. Otherwise people might get an impression he had been in the military in 2022 and describes an actual state of the military instead of his opinion.
1. Manpower does not matter anymore. Drones and (soon) robots do.
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
Drones have a problem. The reason they're so effective right now is because they're dirt cheap. A $10,000 drone can take out a $10,000,000 tank. And it gets into the issue of how money isn't stuff. Because that $10,000 drone isn't made of much and can be easily pumped out pretty quickly, whereas that tank involved a massive amount of supplies. Even if you have all the money in the world, this is a losing battle.
But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.
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Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.
In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.
Leaving the price formation nuances of some US peace-time military artifacts aside, my point is that manpower a.k.a. human soldiers become more and more obsolete and should not be treated as a main criteria perhaps already in the current Russian-Ukraine conflict.
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4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
War was, remains, and will probably always be a deadly game of logistics. Even relatively small divisions of soldiers will go through literally tons of supplies per day. And so getting the stuff to supply these soldiers is essentially what war is. It's why the Russian winter is so famous a weapon in war - it's not just literally freezing invading armies, but making logistics vastly more difficult while simultaneously imposing new requirements on those logistics. This is the reason things like cities are important in war. It's not just some abstract concept of strategic/defensive value, but because they are key points for organizing and advancing logistics. And throughout this entire process humans are the key driver of your logistics, both literally and figuratively.
Also even in terms of pure destruction and death, drones get like 99% of the media attention and analysis, yet good old fashioned artillery is still responsible for something like 80% of deaths. Drones are completely reshaping the modern battlefield, but they're working as a compliment to everything else rather than just overriding it. That might change in the distant future, but it's far from where we are today.
Well they were never aiming to occupy the entire country, the armistice negotiations were for once the decapitation attack on Kyiv succeeded they could negotiation territory annexation and a puppet government.
> The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days was completely nonsensical
I am basing this on the blitz attack on Kyiv, not anyone's rhetoric. I guess in your mind those paratroopers at Hostomel and armor column from Belarus were going to Amazon Prime their food, ammunition, fuel.
There's also the post-invasion rounds of conscription, recruitment from prisons, and the infamous Prigozhin videos where he tells the MoD to stop sending so much ammunition because Wagner was too well-supplied on account of a multiyear war being totally the thing that the Kremlin planned for.
> including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who, in this conflict, have a much better reputation for calling Russia's strategy than Russia or you. And they'd probably show you the receipts if you engaged them directly.
> it transforms into a war of attrition
Okay I stopped caring, everything from here on out seems like you giving a lecture at a military academy but I have no reason to believe you know the first thing about the subject. Based on your another commentary it seems more like you are trying to make the Russian invasion seem to be proceeding normally by changing what normal is.
Pokrovsk? Great example of Russia's strategic incompetence. It was eliminated as a military asset a year ago, and they simply could have moved on. But because of fixation on toponym political victories they have continued to throw resources at it pointlessly. Pokrovsk has probably been a net win for Ukraine.
I haven't been following events too closely lately and didn't realize we were already at the [x isn't even strategically relevant] point with Pokrovsk. I'd assumed that city would hold longer. You might want to edit the Wiki - they're still accidentally calling it a strategic city.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.