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Looks like Putin is trying to keep up appearances of minimising civilian casualties.
Could very easily have pummelled Kiev and surrounding areas with bombers, artillery, and rolled in thousands of tanks.
Acliff-
is he minimising civilian casualties whilst making as much noise as possible hence Chernobyl, the only place in Ukraine most people have heard of.
Counterintuitively pummelling built up areas makes them more difficult to fight through.
He isn’t short of tanks in theatre if he had one posing near Chernobyl with a BMP .
Not sure why he has taken Antonov airport as he knows Lithuania have given Ukraine Stinger missiles and you would have to be deranged to fly in troop transports. Russia may think they have learnt to counter Stinger since Afganistan.
Maybe recent Russian experience with Turkish UAVs has made them rethink shock tactics
Dibble
Google says Kiev is 75km from the Belarus border we expected the 3rd Shock Army to move faster than that back in the 80’s