But even more consequential than the corruption, officials and analysts said, were the ways Putin fundamentally misunderstood his own military.

Russia had, in fact, spent 20 years getting ready for a radically different kind of war.

It had not prepared its military to invade and occupy a country as big and powerful as Ukraine, officials and analysts said. Instead, Russia had largely organized its military to keep U.S. and NATO forces away by inflicting maximum damage from afar.

Central to this strategy was a series of outposts — Kaliningrad by the Baltic, Crimea in the Black Sea, and the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean — to use long-range missiles to keep Western forces at bay. In the event of conflict, Russia intended to blind the enemy and destroy it from a distance, American officials said.

But in this case, Russia did not crush Ukraine with weeks of missile strikes in advance. It marched in quickly with forces on the ground. 

...the invasion of Ukraine was simply “not what the Russian military was designed to do,” putting it in a position it was probably “least prepared” to deal with, said Clint Reach, a researcher at RAND.

In other words, the Kremlin picked the “stupidest” of all potential military options by rushing forward and trying to take over Ukraine, said General Budanov, the Ukrainian military intelligence chief. 

Russia had not trained its infantry, air and artillery forces to work in concert...

 

Russians do not have the intellectual capacity or the moral backbone of human beings.