Russia taking over a country with its B team on the ground, while most of its Airforce is still on the tarmac.
I've come to the conclusion that all the "B Team" cannon fodder, "good stuff held in reserve" thinking is wrong.
They have held back on mass artillery and rocket attacks somewhat for reasons of hoping to quickly capture Ukraine intact, and international opinion, but that's not the same thing. Their performance
is really that bad. So much so it has people coming up with theories about inferior troops and units being used first for various reasons. I think it's because in high-trust Western societies we just can't conceive of how much graft and ineptitude can exist. Plus people think "BIG RUSSIA" and forget that they've got a GDP smaller than California, Texas, and Italy. And they're now 30 years out from a Soviet closed command economy that could mitigate defense production somewhat (always overestimated intentionally by the West even then), and have to pay for their military equipment within something more resembling a real-world economy.
What "A Team" stuff Russia does have is limited. Pilot air time and airworthiness of even their good stuff is a fraction of Western Air Forces. Someone in the U.S. Air National Guard gets as much flight time as a front line Russian unit does. Maybe more. And what they do have of newer good stuff, they can't afford to replace it if lost in combat. Further, I suspect that some good stuff is positioned internally in Russia as a hedge against a coup or regime change.
Another example, Russian performance in Syria can be defined as "adequate" at best, and that's with hand picked equipment and men skimmed off the top of several different units and brought together in their expeditionary force.
This is what Russia has got. And calling it "B Team" is generous. They tried for a more Western style rapid strike and decapitate maneuver early on in the war, where the VDV Airborne, and Spetsnaz troops had taken the Antonov airport near Kiev, and it failed horribly. They were slaughtered by Ukrainian defenders as they retook the airfield. They're using Baofeng commercial walkie-talkies on clear analog channels for comms.
Conscripts on one year terms is further hampering them greatly. One can imagine they don't get nearly the training their Western counterparts do, and if they did, their term would be up almost as it was complete. And with the fraud, graft, and incompetence, I suspect much of that training only exists on paper, and never actually happened.
Honestly, in a way this is more dangerous, because the more third-world Russia's performance looks, the more clear it's becoming they're a borderline failed petro-state with nukes. One could hope that their nuclear forces suffer from many of the same deficiencies their conventional forces do, but if even a few hundred work, and they use them because Putin feels like he's got nothing left to lose, it'll be the worst day the World has seen since World War II, probably worse.
Lying about being partnered with Ukraine running biological research labs was dumb. It was public knowledge and was going to get revealed sooner or later.
This is definitely a WTF head-scratcher for sure. I'm trying to figure out what the impetus for this even was. Research they couldn't do in the US? Just unaccountable slush-fund money finding weird perverse uses?
I'm definitely looking at this with open eyes, and the US and Ukraine are definitely far from being pure as driven snow here. But in the sense that multiple things can be true at once, I still think this is largely naked aggression on the part of Russia, and Putin's desires to empire-build.