Maybe. But I think we also need to consider the possibility that these are their first-tier forces, and they just suck.
If they are, then the Russian military is in much worse shape than anyone thought. And this would be a nearly insurmountable, systemic problem, if it’s the case. Personally, and based on some of the stuff I’ve read or heard from folks who know more about Russian doctrine than I pretend to, I think that this is indeed their 2nd or 3rd tier, that the Russians really don’t have an issue throwing under-trained and poorly equipped forces in at the spear head to soften up the Ukrainians and soak up causalities and forcing the Ukrainians to expend what they, knowing their better equipped follow up forces will mop them up.
Even if these guys are their best, however, they are getting the job done. If you are following things on the interactive map, you can see a steady progress, and it looks like the Russians managed to break out, to a degree, from Crimea and are driving north west to try and encircle Kyiv from that direction. The other spearheads also seem to be making slow, but steady progress. The land bridge from Crimea to the break away regions seems like it’s pretty much complete, giving Russia a corridor from Crimea back to Russia.
So, even if they do suck, they are still grinding their way through Ukraine…and, I’m starting to get more than a bit worried about a large part of the Ukrainian military being trapped in a pocket. To me…it looks pretty grim. 
An ex-military youtuber who clearly knows his stuff said that sending in weak troops to test defenses was absolutely Russian military doctrine. He concurred with the general consensus that Russia isn’t performing as expected, but that many things that we interpret as poor performance are not.
But by sending in your bad troops first, you are strengthening your enemy’s confidence and boosting their morale.
Had Russia sent in the absolute best first and without restraint, they might have successfully blitzkrieg’d Ukraine in the first few days.
I mean if they do WW3 will truly start.
I don’t disagree. It also says a lot about the morality of the creators of the doctrine.
It seems some have questions about why Russia’s long column to the north of Kyiv has been sitting there unmoving for days. Maybe they are just waiting for the troops from the Crimea to make there way up to the south of Kyiv?
Maybe that long column is not some huge logistical fuck-up but instead only the mildly fucked-up fubar (mis-timing between northern and southern siege forces) that are common by any military at war.
I think it’s a combination of factors. As you say, the Russian’s are waiting for all the elements to be in place before they really start pushing into Kyiv. Ukrainian resistance has been more than they seem to have anticipated. This has caused delays. Also, Russian logistics doctrine seems to be to move columns in this fashion. I was watching a video discussing Russian logistics and that if you watch where they have moved to, it is pretty much as expected. You also have the fact that, the Ukrainians have been deliberately targeting Russian logistics assets (bowser, supply trucks, etc), to the extent that Russia has been trying to disguise their fuel trucks as other things. Another part of this is that Russian doctrine is to put all their artillery and such in place, soften up a target, get FOBs and the like in place, then stage up before doing a full assault on a city like Kyiv…and you can see them doing that, getting all the pieces in place.
And, of course, there is an element to the logistical fuck-up aspect as well. This has been a weakness in Russian forces since the late days of the Soviet Union, and one they apparently haven’t addressed very well. Another video I watched seemed to suggestion the Russians are really good at staging logistics using their rail network, but they are weak on logistical support in combat until they are able to take an area, secure it, and essentially build logistics infrastructure to support further moves forward. I was watching a video of the Russians trying to build what was essentially a pipeline (a series of pipes laid out on the ground) to move fuel forward. It was a bit hard to believe they would do something like this at this stage, but that actually seemed to be what their doctrine calls for.
That force that is south of Kyiv (moving north west out of Crimea) seems to have been stalled for some reason. I’m not seeing on the map a lot of combat symbols, but they hardly moved since yesterday (another thing, oddly, the Russians don’t seem to move a night. They basically only move during the day. Not sure if that means they don’t have night vision or some other reason). The two thrust that started from Russia in the north east and are moving directly towards Kyiv seem to have basically reached their staging positions, and the thrust out of Belarus in the north seems to be in a similar position. The link up out of Crimea towards the breakaway territory linking it back to Kyiv seems to still be trying to complete the encirclement of Mariupol and take the city. That, at least as far as I can tell, has also stalled for now.
It’s about 500 kilometres from the Polish border to Kiev. That’s an extraordinarily long range for an anti-aircraft missile. A quick search showed that the Russian SA-500 system has the world record range distance of a target hit at 480 kms, but I believe that was with a target engaged by radar, which would either mean integrated forward radar vehicles/sites, or a very high target.
That still leaves the same problem of escalation. Poland/EU/NATO/US/UN declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Russia ignore the declaration and continue bombing Ukraine targets. A ground-to-air missile is launched from Poland against Russian bombers. We’re kind of into science fiction here, but I assume the missile would be detectable. Why wouldn’t Russia respond with cruise missile attacks against the Polish launch site? And then is that viewed as a fair exchange within the boundaries of detente, or an attack against NATO? The problem with escalation is that it’s a game of chicken with a nuclear result. Shooting down aircraft by missile, even if done over a great distance, isn’t much less of a provocation than sending in a fighter squadron.
I misread the post I was replying to, and I missed the edit time window when trying to write an alternative response. An attempt to enforce a no-fly zone within Ukraine via ground-to-air missiles in Poland would be impossible and an act-of-war subject to escalation. However, that was not the question being asked and my reply was an inadequate response to the question being asked.
I believe that if the west supplies more powerful anti-aircraft weaponry to Ukraine, to be used by Ukraine soldiers within Ukraine territory, that will not be viewed as a NATO escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war.
I agree. The trouble would be supplying them with a system they already know how to use and can support internally. For the hand held and shoulder launched variety you can basically send them anything, but for a SAM system you are going to need a lot more than just sending them the launch vehicle and some reloads.
But, yeah, we could do that and at least from our perspective it wouldn’t be an escalation. After all, we are already sending them other stuff.
random thought:
If cought in an ever-escalating scenario - how realistic could a “secret” (and highly quirurgical) bombing of some high value strategic targets through Stealth-Fly-ware of undisclosed origin be?
High altitude laser guided bombs, in-out, etc…
Would there any proof - beyond plausible deniability exist? (what? a war-thingy of yours just blew up? … no, we have no idea how that happened, when was the last time you cleaned the bypass line of the fetzer valve on that thing, oh damn … did anybody get hurt???)
or is that pipe-dream-territory? (not getting cought in the act, even if everybody know what’s going on)
It’s a pipe dream. missiles and bombs are not designed to be stealthy, just stealthy enough to avoid detection until it’s too late to intercept them. And the Russians are definitely capable of determining whether something has been hit by air-launched missiles or bombs.
I think the realistic thing NATO can do was said by Zelenskyy…if NATO can’t or won’t impose a no-fly-zone over Ukraine, give us the planes and we well (this is a paraphrase). We need to be pushing on this and cutting through whatever is holding it back.
North Korea is only able to keep going because it receives a regular stream of economic aid from China.
It might work, but only if done in tandem with Ukrainian attacks. For instance, the US would have to time it perfectly so that a B-2 or F-35 was dropping bombs on the convoy right around the time that the Ukrainian Fencers and Frogfoots were also hitting the convoy. That would be almost impossible to time. But if done correctly, it could amplify the damage done to the Russian convoy while not necessarily tipping off the Russians.
The more Ukrainian aircraft involved (to cause as large a hubbub as possible), the better for the US to disguise. So this would have to be coordinated. Ukraine would have to agree “We’ll launch a massive tactical bombing raid at XXXXXX hours on such-and-such-a-date” and the stealth planes would mingle with the mix (high enough to not be seen by the eye, of course - and this would have to be night time) - ideally striking Russian SAMs in the convoy to further enable the attack.And while this went on, the Ukrainians would ideally be hitting the convoy with ground troops, ground artillery, too, etc.
And the US couldn’t take it too far. The Ukrainians destroying 300 Russian vehicles in one night is believable. Destroying 3,000 is not, and would betray American involvement.
I assume you are referring to this Task & Purpose video. There is an element of truth in this but I think it is conflating doctrines for different types of objectives. They might send in a weaker force just to test the capabilities of an opponent with uncertain capabilities to draw them out and expose their strengths and weaknesses. It is also general defensive doctrine in creating a “defense in depth” to put less capable units in the outer boundary so as to force an enemy to waste time, consumables, and effort before confronting the more capable defense. However, neither of these apply to the Russian Army invading Ukraine, which is obviously not a defense. The Russians are quite aware of the relatively modest and weak Ukrainian conventional forces, which they have been testing for quite a while in the Donets Basin, and they’ve elected for a thrust going all the way to Kyiv which is deep in the heart of Ukraine. This is no testing of defenses, and not sending highly capable forces would be a miscalculation even if they had a significant reserve.
Numerically the Russian and Soviet armies looked impressive but the raw numbers don’t necessarily translate into capabilities. The Russian military is and has been since the Soviet era a predominately conscript force with enlisted serving for nominal 12 month terms and officers often taking on the roles of what senior NCOs would do in US and other Western militaries. It also lacks the logistic capabilities of the US military and particularly massive airlift capacity, making it highly reliant up rail. Russia has also never held large stocks of refined petroleum because it needs to sell it internationally for hard cash, which means a sustained push was never a real possibility. All of this combined with a lack of maintenance and what would appear to be deception and unclear objectives makes for a very unfocused effort even before Russian advances were slowed by insurgent tactics and their own lack of planning.
The Russians have traditionally depended on their relatively large and capable ‘Spetznaz forces for victories in South Ossetia, Crimea, and in the Chechnyan conflicts, but while special operations is good at creating disruption and confusion, you need masses of infantry and air power to hold ground, and the Russians have been flailing with both. That said, they have been successful in objectives to capture power plants, electrical distribution, and communication centers in the East, trying to choke Ukraine into submission. However, they have underestimated (as do many major powers, the US most definitely included) the will and morale of people to defend their homeland from incursion even against daunting odds, much to their peril. What will ultimately cause this invasion to fail, however, isn’t the Russian lack of preparation or the indomitable will of Ukrainians to fight but economics; the Russian economy just can’t sustain this effort even aside from the devastating effects that sanctions will have on the trade-dependent Russia. The question is really how many people will needlessly die before that comes to pass.
And North Korea serves as both the burr under the saddle of other powers opposing China, and and a rationale for why China needs to be the regional hegemony to rein them in. It’s the Burns and Allen of international relations, albeit one that could definitely blow back on China if they aren’t careful.
Stranger
Russia has plenty of AEW&C aircraft and barring insanity or technical difficulties, it would be extremely unlikely they wouldn’t be monitoring the air space around troop/supply concentrations. They also have satellite views. Spoofing that kind of operation should be next to impossible, especially as Russian intelligence as a whole likely isn’t that incompetent. They’d probably know relatively soon after the fact if NATO planes were lifting off from airbases to hit targets in Ukraine.
Never mind that I’m pretty sure Ukraine is quite incapable at this point of launching a “massive tactical bombing raid”.
The only way NATO gets involved in actual fighting is openly. Air strikes on the sly just aren’t going to happen - the plausible deniability would be so low as to make it pointless.
I skipped a chunk of posts from the middle of this thread so I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but I think I heard about Ukraine wanting to borrow military aircraft from a NATO country, like Poland. If we/NATO were to deliver to Ukraine some ground strike aircraft (A-10?), but let the Ukraine military operate them, would that have the same risks as NATO getting directly involved? Does Ukraine not have any “Air Force” of its own already?
Striking that convoy seems like a fairly straightforward way for Ukraine to defend itself.
This is essentially the plot of Never, Ken Follett’s latest novel.