aircooled said:
I will say, as is pretty obvious to most, the general failure of the Russian military "might" is likely the biggest surprise. The corruption on multiple levels, moral, operational and material have all combined to make the Russian military a shadow of what it pretended to be (be careful about believing marketing). In retrospect, and learning more about how the Russian military in general works, it not a huge surprise, but a year ago, the marketing worked.
The effective destruction of what was generally considered the most elite unit of the Russian military, the airborne forces, or VDV, at Hostomel airport outside Kyiv I think was a prime example of this. Arrogance and over confidence seemed to rule the day in the Russian military.
That's what happens when you use the same marketing team for domestic and foreign consumption. Russian soldiers have been told they're hot E36 M3, and without a recent conflict to disabuse them of that notion, they believed the hype.
I have many of the same thoughts on the military side, so I don't feel the need to repeat what's been said. Diplomatically, if someone had said a year ago that NATO would be more unified than ever (arguably), and that Sweden and Finland would be trying to join as fast as possible, I would have probably snorted derisively. But I also think that it's still very short-term, and there's nothing to guarantee this level of unity will persist; in fact, I think the cracks are already forming. That the US is shouldering the majority of the financial burden is absolutely nothing new (this goes back to 1949), and in spite of pledges to increase European defense budgets, I expect there will be backpedaling in a number of instances.
Right now the war is still in the first phase: both sides are rejecting talks under any sort of workable terms, and both are still committed to winning. Only when the costs get too high for one or both will that change, and I don't think it's especially close. When it does happen, it's likely to take the form of Western pressure on Ukraine to reduce the scope of its aims due to the cost (I've detailed this argument here before), or Russia seeking talks directly with the US and/or EU, in an effort to minimize Ukraine's voice in the final settlement and exploit divisions in the Western camp.
If there's an overarching lesson here, it's one that's been taught and forgotten a thousand times. Clausewitz put it succinctly: "War is policy by other means." Even though we're talking about military factors a lot, it's easy to forget that they are being carried out in service to policy objectives. Getting bogged down in the military details makes it easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, which becomes a very real problem when it occurs among decision-makers in the corridors of power.
