Occupying Kyiv means urban guerilla warfare and a lot of civilan deaths.
They don't want to occupy Kyiv, they want to threaten to occupy Kyiv. Which is exactly what this preposterously-slow convoy accomplishes.
How could they possibly hope to get this? A peace accord with demilitarization on the Ukrainian site would only be possible if the Ukrainians trusted Russia. But Russia did not feel bound to their former agreements on keeping Ukraine as a sovereign state. How could Ukraine be guaranteed not to be invaded completely after demilitarizating?
I suspect the plan is to just keep increasing the pressure until this piece of paper materializes.
Maybe at some point Zelensky gets killed by "accident" and whoever takes over signs the piece of paper. Or that guy refuses and he turns up dead. It's a war zone, crazy shit will happen.
Franklin Roosevelt had the Navy's obsolete battleships all parked in Pearl Harbor when war was threatening in the Pacific. The all-important aircraft carriers were far away. Everyone in the US Navy understood how a successful attack would run, because it had been rehearsed twice already by the Navy itself.
https://twitter.com/politblogme/status/1499868149776322563?s...
I seem to remember a $120 million F35 falling into the South China Sea a couple of weeks back. Easy come, easy go.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/navy-recovers-stealth-35-sou...
Then, Putin will have re-established Ukraine as a vassal, and have a Neo Russian Empire which the Russian population will chauvinistically and enthusiastically accept. 'We have freed the Ukranians' is what they can tell themselves even though clearly the Ukrainians are willing to literally fight to the death indicates otherwise.
Correct in that they don't want to 'occupy' anything, that's expensive. They thought Ukraine would capitulate quickly.
Evidence for this points to the fact Putin had to call up Chechen units, marshall units from far away, get Bealurus soldiers involved, and the fact he's still losing a few aircraft every day and does not have air superiority, which surely he would like to have established.
I doubt that and Zelensky is not really the problem. Go and inform yourself as to what is going on.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/04/how-zelensky-made-peac...
There is a 'Hitler supporter' in every random group of 300 people you can assemble on the planet.
Those 'Angry Nationalists' would not have existed were it not for Putins constant interventions with Yanukovich and then the 2014 invasion.
No Putin intervention -> no Nazis.
FYI Zelenky was is joke, a turd, totally 'the wrong person' - his heroism is due to what he is doing, not what he was. Whatever kind of 'quesitonable leader' he was before, he is now 'Churchill'. He's a figure of history now.
No Nuland intervention -> No putin intervention
So who is responsible?