ONLY THE USUAL SUSPECTS WERE SURPRISED:

 In Putin's Wars, Mark Galeotti, a British scholar and journalist highly regarded by experts on Russian military matters, attributes the unexpected battlefield outcome to Russian weaknesses as well as Ukrainian strengths (greatly abetted by NATO weapons and American intelligence resources), but he lays out a persuasive, detailed case that Russia's deficiencies are more severe and more deeply rooted than many Western officials and pundits had detected.

Galeotti notes that Moscow overloads its army with weapons but allots too little money and attention to the mundane stuff of logistics--spare parts, food, water, and the trucks to transport them--thus leaving supply lines vulnerable and making offensive operations unsustainable. Junior officers receive rote training, so they're unprepared to take the initiative--a deliberate policy to keep them from rebelling against senior officers, though as a consequence, campaigns can plunge into chaos if they don't go as planned. Combine all this with widespread hazing of enlisted men, ramshackle barracks, poor nutrition, and low pay, and it should have been foreseeable that while today's Russian soldiers might be roused to defend the motherland, they're lackluster at invading other countries.

Up to a week before the invasion, I was predicting that for all these reasons Putin would not go through with it. I thought he might send in troops to occupy Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, a slice of which Russian Special Operations Forces and Moscow-backed separatist militias already controlled, but trying to conquer all of Ukraine--next to Russia itself, the largest country in the former Soviet Union, with a population of 40 million people--seemed a losing proposition. My military analysis, it turned out, was spot-on; I went wrong in overestimating Putin's rationality.

Galeotti dissects the many ways that Putin miscalculated his military's strength. 

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