Talvez o Czar Vlad tenha dado um tiro na bota. Infelizmente por baixo da bota do Czar está o povo ucraniano

«Yet, in a broader sense, the moment Mr Putin is obliged to wage such a war of attrition, he will already have lost. In Ukraine the patriotic spirit forged from his targeting of cities and their inhabitants has already ensured that any government which rules in his name will be seen as illegitimate. Across much of the world, he would become even more of a pariah. And at home, he would preside over a society strangled by sanctions and trampled under his repressive regime.

It seems ever clearer that the Russian elite is appalled—and impoverished—by his paranoid adventurism. The worse his plans go in Ukraine, the sooner cracks will start to appear in his regime and the more the Russian people will take to the streets. If Mr Putin is to hold on to the Kremlin, he may be obliged to impose terror of a severity that Russia has not seen for decades.

Mr Putin’s first mistake was to underestimate his enemy. Perhaps he believed his own propaganda: that Ukraine is not a real country, but a fake erected by the cia and run by crooks who are despised by the people they govern. If he expected Ukraine to collapse at the first show of Russian force, he could not have been more wrong.

Mr Putin’s second mistake was to mismanage his own armed forces. His air force has so far failed to dominate the skies. He has laboured to reassure his people that Russia is not engaged in a war, but just what he calls a “denazification” operation. Soldiers, unsure of what they are supposed to be doing, have turned up in Ukraine expecting to be welcomed as liberators. If he orders troops to slaughter their Ukrainian kin in large numbers, they may not obey. If many of his troops die in the attempt to crush Ukrainian cities, as is likely, he will not be able to cover it up at home.»

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«The Russian war machine is nevertheless struggling. Things are very different from 1968. But its performance is also “worse [than] in Georgia in 2008”, says Konrad Muzyka, a defence analyst. That war led to sweeping reforms to the armed forces, but perhaps not sweeping enough. Images from Ukraine show mangled clumps of Russian armour. A video from the alleged aftermath of an ambush on one convoy near Sumy, a north-eastern city, on Sunday, shows the loss of at least a dozen armoured vehicles, including two tanks, and a self-propelled howitzer. The question is whether these troubles are temporary or indicate a deeper rot that Ukraine can exploit.

Russia’s biggest problem appears to be logistics. A Western official says that Russia has particular problems with engineering units. Ukraine has blown up many bridges, and Russia has been unable to get bridging units through congested roads. Russian tanks and other vehicles lie abandoned on the roadside, either broken-down or out of fuel, suggesting supply lines are overstretched, and support units are unable to keep up. Marooned units are prime targets for ambushes. Ukrainian forces have no shortage of arms with which to strike them—in recent days, Denmark, Luxembourg and Finland became the latest European countries to say they would supply thousands of anti-tank missiles.

Nor has Russia secured the skies. Western officials thought that Russian missiles would wipe out Ukraine’s air defences—a network of radars and surface-to-air missiles—in the first hours of a war. In fact, the strikes were lighter than expected, possibly to conserve low stocks of precision munitions. Perhaps as a result, Russia has not made much use of its warplanes so far, though recent footage appears to show Su-34 bombers over Kharkiv and in the south of Ukraine.

The absence of air superiority has two knock-on effects. One is that soldiers lack proper fixed-wing air support—a historic weakness for Russia because of poor co-ordination between ground troops and air forces, says Guy Plopsky, an expert on the country’s air power. The other is that, because Russia is not sweeping the skies with fighter jets, Ukraine can keep more planes up—something helped by Russia’s sparing use of missiles, which means it is hitting only a few points on airfields, rather than cratering them completely. Ukraine is using its Turkish-made tb2 drones to conduct deadly strikes on unsuspecting Russian forces, who seem to have no idea what is above them. Few experts thought these drones would be usable four days into a war.

All of this points to deeper tactical shortcomings. In modern war different elements, including infantry, armour, artillery, air defence, engineering units and electronic warfare, are supposed to work together, each compensating for the other’s weaknesses. A tank, for instance, provides firepower for the infantry that travel with it; in turn, the infantry can dismount and hunt down anti-tank platoons. Russia is making a hash of this. In some cases, its tactics verge on the suicidal. A video reportedly taken in Bucha, a town north-west of Kyiv, shows a Russian armoured vehicle broadcasting propaganda, instructing civilians to remain calm. A man wielding a rocket-propelled grenade strolls up to the vehicle and calmly destroys it.»

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