
I feel like Russia (and a lot of people honestly) vastly underestimated Ukraine as a military power. Like it’s a country of 40 million people or whose whole existence so far has been Russia breathing down their necks while they were mostly isolated from NATO and other Western pacts. And they’ve basically been laying the blueprint for how to utilize guerilla-style drone warfare against a more resourced/powerful military
A lot of Russians genuinely believed they’d be welcomed as liberators, they’d bought putin’s propaganda about how Ukrainians were oppressed by the government Nazis and would cheer for Russia to come and save them. This in addition to the fact that corruption in the Russian military was so unbelievably high that a lot of units had nowhere near the strength they put on paper, and the fact that Russian tactics in the beginning were just straight garbage lmao