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Comment by dgacmu | Hacker News Reader

Russia's inability to have a decisive victory against Ukraine is at odds with the idea that it has sufficient stockpiles and launch capability to reduce kiev to rubble any time it wishes. If it had that capability, it would have the capability to destroy Ukraine's defense manufacturing sector - or simply its entire manufacturing sector - which it clearly does not. It's also at odds with the evidence that Russia is launching missles roughly as fast as they can build them.

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Russia has destroyed most of Ukraine's traditional defense manufacturing sector a long time ago. The problem is that Ukraine has decentralized and/or offshored a lot of its manufacturing.

There's no need for a massive assembly plant to produce a lot of drones from dual-purpose components. Most of these components arrive across the EU border and go to random warehouses that have been converted into assembly shops. There the drones are put together, flashed with the latest firmware and sent to the armed forces, where they are armed and launched.

The bigger problem Russia faces is the surprisingly sorry state of its AA. It's been designed to detect and intercept strategic bombers and multirole fighters, but it's been almost 40 years since Mathias Rust, and it still can't handle a cheap and slow flying target, relying only on point defense systems that can be and are overwhelmed. Ukraine has inherited the same Soviet tech but managed to build a better detection system that collects and processes the data from thousands of cheap listening stations across the country.

I guess the question becomes then why did putin start the war without sufficient buildup of missile reserves to flatten Kyiv in the first few days? And why not contract with israeli defense companies for precision missile technology? It doesn't seem like their relations are really that severed even with the whole Iran issue. One would also think China might also appreciate a client willing to battle test their precision military hardware.

You'll have to ask Putin that question. But the usual intelligence analysis of that decision is based on several factors.

1. Putin thinks the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 was a historic disaster and wants to reassemble much of it as some sort of new "Russian Empire" in order to control more resources and establish defensive space to protect the motherland against a future foreign invasion. He sees Ukraine as a fake country.

2. Russian demographics are collapsing and Putin himself is aging so this was his last chance to take decisive action. Despite limited stockpiles of advanced weapons, waiting would have made an invasion even harder.

3. Putin has surrounded himself with loyal yes-men who curried favor by telling him what he wanted to hear instead of giving him accurate information about Ukrainian politics and military capabilities.

4. Putin perceived Joe Biden as being particularly weak and unlikely to take decisive action.

5. Russia's recent invasions of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) had gone fairly well so it wasn't irrational to expect a rapid victory.

To be clear I'm not trying to justify or excuse Putin's decision (I hope he loses) but rather to explain how he might have reached it.

Israel isn't going to sell advanced weapons to Russia in current circumstances. It would be impossible to hide. Intelligence analysts can pick apart little fragments from a missile explosion and determine where the components were made. It's not technology that Russia lacks but the capacity to manufacture that technology at scale with acceptable quality.

China is making a fortune selling weapons and dual-use equipment to both Russia and Ukraine. But they don't sell the good stuff because they don't want sensitive technology to fall into US hands, and because they want the option to bite off a chunk of Russian territory later.

Add to all of that: this started as a war of conquest. Putin seems to have believed that Russian forces would quickly take Kiev, depose the government, and install a client regime in its place. You don't want to destroy property you think you'll shortly own, so there would have been no point stocking up enough munitions to do so.

The airport raid by SF on the first day of the war arguably came close to success.

This whole thing was a war of ‘yes men’ telling the big bad what he wanted to hear, even though it was insane.

Also Iran.

Absolutely. On the other hand, Russia's previous conquests / adventures (Chechnya; Georgia, 2008; Ukraine, 2014) were shrugged at by the west. It's wasn't insane to expect that taking over the rest of Ukraine, if quickly successful, would have been treated likewise. I'm cynical enough to think it probably would have been.

The "yes men" told Putin the military was able to do it. Probably they even thought it was, because everyone below them - right down to the individual soldiers selling off their fuel and ammunition - said everything was a-ok.

Even so, the initial invasion was a near-run thing.

The US was publicly announcing Russia’s troop movements literally weeks in advance. it was pure delusion to think blitzkreig would actually have worked.

Because "Flatten a city" actually takes dramatically more scale than anyone has seen in decades.

40k Tons of bomb were dropped on Berlin in WW2. That's nearly all explosive payload too.

That's about equivalent to 80k modern cruise missile warheads.

The US has built less than 5000 Tomahawk missiles ever.

Russia has fired approximately 6000 missiles into Ukraine in the course of the war.

This is why the US still maintains a fleet of ancient "Bomb Truck" style bombers in the B52. Nothing compares to 100 B52s flying over a target for weeks. They allowed us to drop 20k tons of bombs on Vietnam and the surrounding countries. A horrific capability.

Gaza is a combination of Israel being utterly fucking insane and apparently desiring to terrorize people, and the fact that Gaza is super tiny.

Because he thought he wouldn't need to use them. He expected Ukraine to accept the inevitable and not provide meaningful resistance. He almost got away with it, too. Had the Russian army launched its missile stockpiles at Ukrainian powerplants on day 1, it would've done enough damage to overwhelm the country. However, he declared that "Ukrainians were not our enemies, only the Ukrainian leadership and specific armed nationalist groups were", so he couldn't have attacked the country's civilian infrastructure until after the citizens of Ukraine decided that Russia was their enemy.

Flattening a city doesn't win a war. They started the war with the intent of driving tanks into the city and overthrow the government in three days, but (as the article mentions) that didn't work out.

But flattening cities is a WW2 strategy, and it didn't actually do much to win the war in the end, only cause unnecessary civilian suffering.

If you flatten all of them and kill the residents, you will win the war. The question is just how far are you willing to go, not the lack of capacity to do so.

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