Originally Posted by
Andy
My guess is that Putin only planned on taking the eastern breakaway provinces but after seeing the nonresponse from the west, he decided to go for the whole country. Russia is making slow steady progress; I'm not sure where these western non-military pundits get the idea that this is going poorly for Putin.
Non-response? He invaded from the north to take Kyiv like the day after he declared the Donbass a Russian-protected independent region. And the only thing "the west" hasn't done was join the fight with their own equipment, which hasn't been on the table for decades. Even during the Cold War, every effort was taken to not directly engaged Soviet forces.