Not Russia, Putin. And Putin fears strong leadership particularly among his cronies and fellow Russians. Like Stalin, he wants to keep everyone under his thumb and kills off any threats to his power. What he's left with is incompetents, no surprise there.
I could never see a rational reason for Bush's invasion of Iraq. He himself was on record as saying that "nation building" is not on his agenda. As far as all those "weapons of mass destruction" claims, they certainly worked on the intellectually challenged but I recognized the propaganda for what it was, "weapons of mass delusion." I had a couple good conversations with workmates who were taken by all the pictures that Colin Powell offered. We had inspectors on the ground in Iraq. What were the dates of those pictures from Powell?
Ukraine doesn't want to be part of Russia but can't be armed with weapons strong enough to deter Russia. Putin seemingly has enough people to send to Ukraine to die. So stalemate. Breaking that stalemate would require Russia to be harmed economically enough to make the oligarchs take Putin down. Or Ukraine all of a sudden getting trounced, but a ground war requires an army, and Russia's ground forces have proven pathetic.
So the survival of the free world depends on its people being suckered in by a sunk costs fallacy?
on Twitter: "MY TOP 100 CLIPS OF 2022. Part 3.
The closest Western analogue is to the Mafiosi. The Capos throw their weight around, but they dare not cross the big boss, and if they even look like they might waver in their loyalty, they risk falling out of a window.
[update]
The basic problem is that in a country like Russia the skills to rise in rank have little to with combat capability. They also have the opposing objectives of concentrating for security vs dispersing for safety from stuff coming from the sky. Spread out and the partisans and snoops have a much easier time of it, clump and you pay for it at HIMARS o'clock.
Fundamentally, Iraq happened because Saddam would only behave when we were poised to invade. Bush got tired of having to move troops over to get him to behave and went in. And WMD wasn't propaganda, it was Saddam's underlings lying to him. They kept reporting having kept the WMD from the inspectors, in reality it was stuff that had never existed other than in their reports. (People afraid of being executed for failure.) It was his own culture of fear that got him deposed and executed.
The thing is they know that if Russia gets land that virtually guarantees future conflict that Russia is more prepared for. Ukraine is better off fighting the war now than later.
It's also very difficult to prevent conscripts from deserting, unless you keep them concentrated in large groups which can be constantly supervised by a small number of loyal NCOs. Dispersal offers conscripts far more opportunities to abscond.
Ukraine learned the same lesson early in the war, when Russia was hitting their bases and ammunition dumps with missiles.
This is the behaviour of an army that's terrified of security threats - both from external saboteurs or thieves, and from conscripts trying to escape their service.
ISW said:
It is a lot easier to claim land than to hold it. Russia's problem isn't as much they can't make progress as it is they lack the man power to hold onto any winnings. And again, this becomes a mini-WWI. Little progress at a terrible cost... for no damn reason at all.
The Shahed drones are not that sophisticated. They're just slow loitering munitions with GPS and pre-programmed target coordinates. Their initial success was partially due to numbers and element of surprise, but now that they're expected, Ukraine has probably been able to figure out a good system how to deal with them.
