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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I cite in evidence of Russian ineptness the entire history of their invasion of Ukraine.

Given their vast and extensive advantages at the beginning of the invasion, if they were even vaguely competent they really would have been holding a parade in Kyiv within a few months.

A competent military wouldn’t have lost their flagship, or let Ukraine counter-invade taking thousands of square kilometres of Russian territory. A competent regime wouldn’t have dismissed US warnings of an imminent terrorist attack on a specific music venue in Moscow and just let it happen.

Loading up a tanker with power hungry kit it’s not able to properly support without discussing the idea with the crew, while threatening the crew if they don’t keep quiet, is par for the course.

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Before the invasion Ukraine had a total military force (including reserves) of 1.2 million backed by sizable numbers of highly motivated and heavily armed 'nationalist' forces. Since 2014 the West had been gradually arming Ukraine and various cities like Bakhmut were essentially fortified citadels enabling a defensive force to pose extreme resistance.

There was 0 chance Ukraine was going to just flop over. Iraq and Afghanistan were humble villages by contrast - one which we lost to, and the other which our 'victory' amounted to bombing the government then hiding out in tiny little ultra fortified 'green zones' while waving a victory flag. In both cases with the wars dragged on for decades. Now imagine if Russia had decided to jump in one of those invasions and start shipping hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons to them, providing intelligence, and so on.

Russia obviously just thought they were ambushing Ukraine and could get some agreement for them to not join NATO without a real war. Then the West decided to get involved, similarly thinking they were ambushing Russia and that the first sight of HIMARS or a Panther tank would send the Russian army scattering.

Everybody was wrong, so we got a real war that nobody wanted.

The russians weren't looking for an agreement.

They were looking to kill Zelensky and control the entire country.

In fact, they still are.

It was a war from the beginning.

> There was 0 chance Ukraine was going to just flop over.

That's a huge hindsight bias. Even the most optimistic scenarios from various secret services / think tanks predicted only weeks / few months of resistance at the most. If you read Ukrainian accounts, most weren't very optimistic either. You can also read up how many commanders in the south defected - having more such defectors could flip the war quite quickly. The question of whether to defect or not (or simply run) is something which many did on the spot based on their personal circumstances and outlook, it's extremely difficult to predict.

Most Ukrainians didn't defect. Most Ukrainians knew then what we all know now. No hindsight bias here.

In fact there were even analysts outside Ukraine that did listen to Ukrainians and who also knew what was going on.

Here you can listen to Anders Puck Nielsen explain in jan 2022 what we all understand now, that it would be a large and terrible war: https://youtu.be/23JYPb_jHpg?si=6lMedJpEkeuPRuhv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krhmeUkfhu4

There was no news article where I lived (or international) that predicted that resistance would only last weeks or months. Those that did make any prediction about the length of the war pointed towards modern wars like those in the middle east, which demonstrated that modern wars do not end suddenly regardless of what progress either side makes. As long as people have access to weapons there will be enough resistance to make an area a constant war zone.

In the past you needed large armies standing in a line, and tanks to crush that line. When armies made enough progress the remaining soldiers either surrender or ran away. Today you can have a handful people operating a drone to sink a warship, or fire a missile against a plane, or just planting random explosives and mines. They get killed and a new group pop up elsewhere doing the exact same thing. The only method to actually win by eliminating resistance becomes burning down every building and killing every person who used to live there, which obviously is immoral and hurts military moral, takes a lot of time, a lot of resources and people, and diplomatic resources. For a country like Ukraine or Russia it would take decades or centuries.

> There was no news article where I lived (or international) that predicted that resistance would only last weeks or months.

Then you must have not been paying attention.

A summary of those failed predictions: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-invasion-predictions-...

It's a roughly equal part of underestimating Ukrainians and overestimating Russians.

> Those that did make any prediction about the length of the war pointed towards modern wars like those in the middle east, which demonstrated that modern wars do not end suddenly regardless of what progress either side makes.

You mean like Crimea where the resistance never died down and was an active battlefield with daily activity of partisan groups? /s

That article doesn't offer much in the way of citations - instead assuming the claims and mocking the implied makers without clearly stating who they are. I think that's probably because the original quote about Kyiv falling in days didn't come from Russian political or military leaders, but from Mark Milley [1] - the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After that claim was demonstrated to be clearly less than brilliant, the propaganda machine then began subtly (and then not so subtly) suggesting it was actually Russia that was making such claims.

But that was always plainly absurd. The last normal war Russia had was against Chechnya, another country that was tiny and practically unequipped relative to Ukraine, yet that war lasted a decade and had tens of thousands of deaths with a huge culture of great music [2] perpetually reminding people how brutal that war truly was.

You won't find a single source from a Russian political/military leader saying it'd be short, because they all knew it wouldn't be if there wasn't a quick agreement reached. The one quote people were able to find was from some television personality in some segment. But I hope Russia(ns) aren't citing e.g. Rachel Maddow to get insight into American positions on issues !

[1] - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mark-milley-ukraine-war-pre...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e5GDbkS3Gw

The point isn't what Russia said. The point is Russia didn't prepare for a war longer than a few weeks. After the initial attacks stalled, they've had to improvise logistics, drafts, equipment, moving in troops from other directions, making deals with Iran and North Korea, long-term economic solutions to sanctions, etc.

If you trust anonymous in the Internet then I’ll tell you I saw many such predictions in Russian and Western media.

My original comment was mainly about the western agencies / think tanks making such predictions. Russians were denying the invasion till it actually began, so there aren't any public statements, of course.

But what Russians expected can be inferred from what they did - their initial Kyiv offensive, Hostomel landing, it's a clear attempt at a decapitation strike. It's actually a carbon copy of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia which fell without a fight which is apparently what Russians expected here as well.

I completely agree that was an attempted decapitation strike, but where we may disagree is that I don't think they were banking on it succeeding - but it was rather just a high risk, high reward play. For instance they also tried something similar in the first Chechen War, and it failed there as well.

But in this case I'd emphasize that even if that was successful they would have known it would be far from the end of the war. The 'nationalist units' and at least some regular forces would resist, the West would predictably back them endlessly (and probably bring in proxy forces) and the most likely scenario (absent a quick settlement) would be something like Afghanistan 2.0.

> The 'nationalist units' and at least some regular forces would resist

While a great talking point in Russian circles, nationalist units did not represent a significant chunk of Ukrainian forces in 2022. They played a role in the power vacuum of 2014, but not by 2022.

Regular forces were concentrated in the east. If Russia took Kyiv, they'd effectively cut off any supply routes from the West. The resistance would be futile. Remember again how forces in Crimea resisted forever?

> and probably bring in proxy forces

Could you expand on this? Where, who ... how?

> and the most likely scenario (absent a quick settlement) would be something like Afghanistan 2.0.

Most likely based on what? Where do all these fighters hide? Are the Ukrainian plains as good for hiding and launching covert attacks as Afghanistan caves?

Putin assumed that those 1.2 million are just "forcibly separated brothers" that will if not support the "reunification" outright, then at least refuse to fight for a country they don't believe is real. Ukrainian nationalists before the war were presented in Russian agitprop as an extremist minority holding the rest of the country hostage.

It extends for literal centuries before the current Ukraine debacle. The country has been a mindless lumbering brute for most of history.

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