Thanks. Let's hope that by the time this one fills up there's less suffering going on in Ukraine.
I'm really liking the war coverage in the WSJ. Here's the start of a piece they ran today (sorry for the paywall). Putin continues to tell the world and his own people that it's all going according to plan.
How Russia’s Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine - Moscow spent years upgrading its capabilities, only to see the armed forces fail their first major test, confounding earlier Western assessments and giving Ukraine a boost
For over a decade, Russia spent hundreds of billions of dollars restructuring its military into a smaller, better equipped and more-professional force that could face off against the West.
Three weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its first big test, the armed forces have floundered. Western intelligence estimated last week that 5,000 to 6,000 Russian troops had been killed, some of them poorly trained conscripts.
The dead included four Russian generals—one-fifth of the number estimated to be in Ukraine—along with other senior commanders, according to a Western official and Ukrainian military reports. The generals were close to the front lines, some Western officials said, a sign that lower ranks in forward units were likely unable to make decisions or fearful of advancing.
Russian troops turned to using open telephone and analog radios following the failure of encrypted communications systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said, making them vulnerable to intercept or jamming. Russian officers were likely targeted after their positions were exposed by their use of open communications, Western military analysts said.
In the strategically located town of Voznesensk, Ukrainian forces comprising local volunteers and the professional military drove off an attack early this month, in one of the most comprehensive routs Russian forces have suffered since invading Ukraine.
Russia’s failings appear to trace to factors ranging from the Kremlin’s wrong assumptions about Ukrainian resistance to the use of poorly motivated conscript soldiers. They suggest that Russia and the West overestimated Moscow’s overhauls of its armed forces, which some military analysts say appear to have been undermined by graft and misreporting.
The military’s previous outings in staged maneuvers and smaller operations in Syria didn’t prepare it for a multipronged attack into a country with a military fiercely defending its homeland, said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a nonprofit research organization based in Arlington, Va.
“The failures that we’re seeing now is them having to work with a larger force than they’ve ever employed in real combat conditions as opposed to an exercise,” he said. “These exercises that we’ve been shown over the years are very scripted events and closer to theater than anything else.”