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I'm inclined to agree. I don't see how the Russian's haven't baked in this supposed incompetence. I'm sure it's all part of the plan.
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At the moment Russian supply lines are relatively short from the railheads they rely on and the Ukrainians are a long way from Poland. The ground is fairly firm but apparently Eastern Ukraine gets fairly muddy in spring this will be worse for the Russians once they gave churned it up ( they do have specialist armoured vehicles for soft ground). Trying to clog the enemy roads with terrorised civilians is a tactic, Russian calls for civilians to leave the cities isn’t a humanitarian thing it’s to make it easier to fight through the area and hamper the Ukrainians logistics. It’s also safer to have no enemy civilians in your rear areas. I had to do Geneva Convention training once a year which included not raping Displaced Persons,the Russians obviously don’t, I’d be moving my family personally.
The advancing forces need more and more trucks to replenish their troops and to replenish the trucks who are replenishing their troops, the defenders fall back on their supplies. Russians don’t have a lot of trucks.
But Russian tactics don’t really include resupply they set off with enough fuel food etc. You often see tanks with fuel drums on the back BTR apc have special tanks in the rear doors.Then when they are spent the entire unit is replaced with fresh troops. (They have a specific word for this level of consumables I’ll look it up when I get home). I’ll also look up what we expected a unit to do but I think the maximum was 200km or 5 days
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EB
Dibble
@starfish&coffee
I am also on the pessimist side here. It is easy to get caught up in the optimism as you see videos of abandoned Russian tanks and of clueless Russian soldiers surrendering. But to see a straight line from there to victory is to underestimate just how much evil Putin is capable of.
I am not big on military tactics but I would think that what is initially a home field advantage for Ukraine becomes a disadvantage when Russia has 11 timezones worth of relatively functional home country behind them, with food reserves and functioning hospitals, whilst the Ukranians have seen a significant chunk of their working age population become refugees. Who will be left to bake bread or repair a broken bit of road in two weeks time?
It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but in The Road to Unfreedom writer Snyder argues quite convincingly that when the Russians targeted civilians in Aleppo it wasn't carelessness, but an intentional effort to create the refugee crisis of 2015. There are speeches where Putin explains how this tactic will destabilise Western Europe and boost parties like AfD. That's how little human life is worth to him.