Some observations on the war in Ukraine

The Russian Army is bad

T-54 tank of the 50s and 60s. The Russians might as well have just kept using them.

As in crappy.

This is something that's been the case for a long time, potentially all the way back to the permanent establishment of the Red Army following the Russian Civil War.  

Indeed, if we look at its overall history, the Red Army was pretty effectively repelled by the Poles in the Russo Polish War of the 1920s.  It won in the Civil War, but it took it all the way into 1922 to do it, although it did do it.  It was pretty heavily mauled by the Finns in the Winter War.  Soviet propaganda had it defeating the Germans nearly single-handedly during the Second World War, in which it did fight mightily, but it also lost men at a stunning rate in 1941, losing as many men that year as the Germans and their allies committed to Operation Barbarossa, and in many ways was an armed mob with a few good pieces of ground equipment of their own, lots of Western material support, some good aircraft of their own, and some supplied by the Western allies.

Whatever a person thinks of the Red Army of the Second World War, in many ways ever since then the Red Army/Russian Army just hasn't been all that good.  Its NCO corps has always been lacking, and was during World War Two.  Its training is brutal, which ostensibly created tough troops, but it might have made for a lot of disincentivized troops.  And, a few good pieces of equipment, such as the AK47/AKM, and the Mig15 (their air force of course, not their army), but most of their equipment was behind the times or not all that.  Indeed, their armor and aircraft was consistently overrated throughout the entire Cold War, with the West finding excuses for why the stuff we acquired in the Third World couldn't possibly be the first-rate Russian stuff.  It was, it was just bad.

The Russian Army is the heir to that, and it's not improved.  If anything, it's worse.  It's command and control is lacking.  It's ground tactics are primitive and seem to have not advanced from 1942 whatsoever.  And its equipment is a monument to the 1970s.  Right now, if the US gathered up all the old M60 and M48 tanks it had lying around and supplied them to the Ukrainians, it would be pretty much a peer to peer battle where they appeared, except for the fact that the Russians don't really seem to know what they're doing.

How does a modern Army, for example, run out of petroleum for tanks when they're rolling in from just next store?

Or food?

The Ukrainians, having now studied under Western advisors for a few years, do seem to know what they're doing.  They're heirs to the Red Army too, but they've started moving on in strides.

One thing they may not have moved on, however, is in regard to a heritage of guerilla warfare. . . 

Have the Russians not studied history at all?

The Russians are fighting in cities, and they've invaded a county which has a history of fighting everyone in guerrillas.  Did they not think that this would be disastrous?

If the Russians defeat the Ukrainian ground forces, they're going to have to occupy the country with hundreds of thousands of troops for a decade or more and do so with a ruined economy.  The world will move on without Russia in a way that will likely be permanent.  Ukraine will get its freedom back sooner or later.