Russia’s Initial Failures Don’t Mean Ukraine Will Survive

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The first hint that something was off with the initial Russian war effort came in the very first hours. As violent as the strikes looked on television, I knew they were nothing compared with the kinds of aerial and artillery campaigns that typically begin attacks on sovereign nations with intact armies, as is the case with Ukraine.

Then, as the days wore on, that sense that hardened into a consensus. The initial Russian plan was a costly failure, in part because—incredibly enough—it minimized Russian strengths and maximized , apparently in service of a strategy that seems to have been predicated on terrible intelligence that underestimated the Ukrainian military and overestimated Ukrainian