[ayngg]

Their initial campaign was to blitz the entire country and was shown to be overly ambitious. Since then it appears they have scaled back and changed their strategy towards securing the eastern portion of Ukraine, which is what is happening now and has been fairly successful.

Essentially none of the news outlets have provided good coverage on what is happening, because if they did it would reveal how poorly the western powers navigated this, and how much of a disaster this entire thing has been for Europe, irrespective of its effect on Russia.

[DSingularity]

Reality is their initial plan was probably to force enough to commitments by Ukraine to hold Kiev to enable the campaign of slow, steady, encircle, advance, and repeat campaign in the East. It’s kind of how in chess you attack a line to pin pieces which would otherwise be used to counter attack.

People who thought Russia didn’t know the probability of taking Kiev in a blitz is effectively zero are propagandized.

[Nasrudith]

By definition wars are large scale conflicts involving many actors, all interconnected. If it could easily be followed then everyone is doing things horribly wrong if they wind up so predictable and not cycling through manuevers and countermanuvers.

It isn't some grand conspiracy - war is hard and only fools have believed otherwise. "Be home by Christmas" is a synonym for foolishly optimistic for a reason.