[guyromm]

I believe they were working under the assumption it would be a walk in the park, once the central government was captured or killed.

To strengthen this assumption here's a canned article which was likely meant to be published had things gone according to plan, but pulled, since they hadn't.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...

RIA is a state owned news agency.

Why precisely they thought they'd meet no serious opposition in their attempted airdrop near Kyiv is anyone's guess. Mine is that Putin started believing his own tales about Nazis taking Ukraine hostage, assuming the populace is dying to be liberated from them.

Things crumbled once this met a different reality on the ground, and now they're trying to raise the stakes, and have become desperate enough to begin indiscriminately shelling population centres, Kharkiv most notably.

[jopsen]

> Why precisely they thought they'd meet no serious opposition...

Isn't that what everybody thought?

Didn't NATO also think that? Isn't that why the US and friends categorically refused boots on the ground, no-fly-zones or even just strategic ambiguity?

Or maybe, things are just slow, because they are slow..

[ProjectArcturis]

What's Russian for "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators"?

[def_true_false]

Heh, that will sound familiar to many.

Funny how westerners are surprised by this. Not telling the grunts what they are going into has been Russian modus operandi since forever... Just like throwing bodies at the problem, sending conscripts from Central Asia first (throwing actual Russians into the meat grinder might prove unpopular), rampant looting (including of the most absurd stuff like toilets in Georgia 2008), etc, etc.

Somehow most of the pundits and analysts have been blindsided by this stuff, even though it's common knowledge in Eastern Europe.

[CrazyStat]

  - How do people meet you at the liberated territories?  
  - Well. Smiles. Flowers. Tears of happiness… 

https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1498766669614886924

[cycomanic]

I just wrote the exact same thing before seeing your comment, just not so eloquently. I think you are spot on, that really is the only "rational" explanation.

[guynamedloren]

Thanks for sharing. That article is disorienting! How'd you find it?

[Tarragon]

Its existence was reported widely on major news sites, even Boing Boing!.

There's a ton of reporting right now easy to miss important while trying to drink from the firehose.

I first saw it when a friend sent me a link to this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Tom_deWaal/status/1498310064117059585