[News] Putin's clumsy military campaign in southern Ukraine makes little sense

[Ap0caLipse]

LINK: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/07/europe/russia-southern-ukraine-military-analysis-intl/index.html

fortnight into this war, the conflict still seems surreally distant and alarmingly beyond comprehension. Try to ask yourself "how is this happening?" and you lurch out over an abyss so profound it is beyond the reach of your senses. And even if Putin does think he can get his old empire back, how do these 13 days of savagery make that happen? The slow and clumsy Russian campaign for the south has been the most baffling. It is clear what Moscow wants: To cut off Ukraine's access to the Black Sea. What is hard to fathom is whether the Kremlin's plan to get it has collapsed, and Russian troops are just throwing rockets and tanks at anything they can, or whether this sort of total war against Ukrainians was always the plan.

Some 24 hours later, at the same spot, Ukrainian troops had found time to graffiti the unexploded rockets that landed around them with anti-Putin abuse, and the Russians had been pushed further back down the road. Farmers were clambering over an abandoned T90 tank, trying to get it started and quite quickly diagnosing it had a steering problem. That, and the tank having been trapped the ruins of a collapsed bridge, perhaps explains why it had been abandoned. But this was not a rare occasion. On Sunday, the regional governor Vitali Kim posted a video of himself inside another captured Russian Tigr vehicle. Another video showed what seemed to be a significant Russian artillery unit in flames, destroyed or abandoned. The person filming joked that the scarred machines' remains were what "is what's left of our 'brothers,' the ones that came to 'save us'" -- a reference to Moscow's gibberish assertion that it is engaged in a special operation to demilitarize and "de-Nazify" Ukrainians subjugated under a vile regime. The Kremlin's propaganda -- for years something so concentrated and cynical that it found its way into the information ecosystem, and even turned some souls -- is dismissed with the same disregard with which it was authored. It really is just nonsense, and it is refreshing to see most sensible media not even give it oxygen.

Odessa is the prize on the coast. On Monday morning as the city was blasted with horizontal snow, the sirens rang out, enflaming residents' fears of a Russian amphibious landing. Those last three words sound ridiculous here, in a city with hipster dumpling stores hidden in stairwells, and a series of road signs that tell any new Russian arrivals to "f**k off" (straight ahead), "also to f**k off" (left) and to "f**k off back to Russia" (right). The entire Russian project in Ukraine is the stuff of a malarial nightmare. Putin's plan still doesn't make sense. Did the Kremlin genuinely think that Ukraine would collapse in a week, its citizens welcoming them in? If so, then why has the strategy swung so rapidly toward a form of collective punishment once it became clear they were not welcome at all? Was there no plan for something in between appreciation and annihilation? Why are the Russian units we see trying again and again to hit the same targets, often using very similar approaches? Why are so many abandoning their vehicles and accepting capture? And why is the Russian air force, for years flaunted as Putin's new hi-tech toy, proving so very ineffective? There is a temptation to seek rational answers to these questions. The reason we are in this dark place is the failure of the rational to dominate in the Kremlin. We just do not know how far Putin -- who over the course of two weeks has tried to encircle a capital city, placed his strategic nuclear defenses on a higher level of alert, used cluster munitions and attacked a nuclear power plant -- will go. Again and again, the war fails to make sense. It seems to be outside the reaches of what I thought our shared reality was. We can only hope it does not stay that way.