Cogitation in the Time of War #3 - 78 hours later

Maybe nobody reads this, or cares, but I'll say it anyway:

To me Putin is the aggressor and I want Putin to lose (as in not achieve his objectives). So in a way, Russia (the state ruled by Putin) is the "bad guy".

BUT I have no beef against Russians. My children have friends and classmates that are Russians and we told them they have done nothing wrong and they shouldn't even say anything bad about Russians when they go back to school tomorrow. When my son asked me "are the Russians bad guys?" I tried to be very clear to him that not even the soldiers fighting are bad guys, they are just following orders.

We sometimes simplify these things and make it a "us VS them", I have done it and probably will do it in some posts, but I try hard to remind myself of the same words I shared with my kids

With the remark done, let's proceed with some considerations after 78 hours since the start of the invasion:

• Many annalists expected the Ukrainian forces to collapse after 72 hours with the political power collapsing shortly before or after. It seems the Russians expected that too (hence the talk of a clean military operation). But the fact that currently Russia does not even have air superiority is shocking, there's no other way to put it;
• So how could this happen considering the disparity of resources between the 2 sides? Intelligence info suggest the Russians didn't have a well defined strategy and was overly optimistic. This seems to be validated by the operations in the field, the examples being several operations conducted without the proper support (airborne operations attacked from both the air and ground, armoured units advancing without infantry support, infantry units advancing without armoured support). There seems to be a lot of conscripted troops that "didn't sign up for that" and even Rosvgardia units (that is equivalent to a gendarmerie and would be used for population control) being very close to the front;
• However, from the numbers estimated, it seems Russian still has plenty of troops to deploy from the ones previously by the border. So why do we have a mix of second rate troops at the front? They might have an unusual tactic/strategy after all but the more time it passes the less "special" this "special operation" becomes and it gets messier. They mentioned precision strikes without civilian losses but they are moving less precise weaponry that will cause more widespread damage (particularly worrying the thermobaric ones);
• It seems that today and possibly tomorrow is "make or break". I have said for previous nights I was expecting it to become very ugly in the cities, mainly Kyiv, and it was crucial and now I'm saying the same again so of course I'm just guessing, as many others do. But one thing for sure, what happens today and early tomorrow will either confirm or disprove one of the theories behind the Russian plans and shortcoming.

I would like also to share some thoughts about the "other side" views and some arguments being discussed in the public arena but I'm already spending a lot of energy following the operational situation so I might never do that "dissertation"...