War Stories 28Feb22:
No, You’re Not Imagining It: Russia’s Army Is Inept
But superior firepower still gives it an edge in the short run.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/no-youre-not-imagining-it-russias-army-is-inept.html[/URL]
After four days of fighting, the Russian military is bogged down in Ukraine. In part this is due to the valiant resistance of Ukraine’s army and civilian defense forces. But it’s also due to the fact that the Russian army just isn’t very good.
News reports, tweets, videos, and emails from the battlefields show Russia’s armored vehicles abandoned for lack of fuel, its soldiers foraging for food, its transport planes shot out of the sky, its various military elements—tanks, infantry, aircraft—unable to coordinate their aims.
Michael Kofman, a military analyst at CNA, an Arlington, Virginia–based think tank, who has been following the battle closely, tweeted late Sunday afternoon, “It’s taken me a while to figure out what [the Russian military is] trying to do, because it looks so ridiculous and incompetent.” B.A. Friedman, a military historian and tactician, went further: “This isn’t a good army executing a bad plan. It isn’t a good army executing outdated or out-of-context tactics. It’s a bad army!”
Ukrainians are hurling Molotov cocktails at Russians. Hungarians and Finns have done the same.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/28/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news/[/URL]
*paywall you might have to use reader mode.
The young men waited in the shadows until the Russian tank had passed them on the narrow city street. Then one jumped from a doorway, climbed onto the vehicle and jammed a crowbar into its tread, bringing it to a halt.
When a member of the tank crew cracked open a hatch to take a look, another man threw a flaming molotov cocktail, while the first man jerked open the hatch and dropped in a hand grenade. Other men then clambered over the tank, yanked out the Russians and shot them.
“As long as there are old bottles and gasoline supplies and rags to serve for fuses, no Russian tank will be safe in the streets,” a member of the besieged country’s defiant government declared in the New York Times. (His name was withheld for security reasons.)
The Russian army has “met its match in the molotov cocktail,” he proclaimed.
