Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Because bigger picture; the "garbage" did hold them back. What had been a Russian flying column lightning war to take Kiev and install their own government fell on its arse, not least due to clear failures on the Russian logistical side. Spun up at first as the now memory holed "feint" then and much later the whole "Boris Johnson told Kiev to keep fighting" because that sounds better. Yes indeed… Never mind the later losses of Kherson and Kharkiv within weeks of the Kremlin declaring them Forever Russia©. Never mind the also memory holed coup that wasn't from their own private military unit that rattled the Kremlin into blocking roads with buses and lashing together lightly armed checkpoints on the outskirts of Moscow.

Two years in even with the shortages of AA and no Ukrainian air force to speak of Russia still doesn't have air superiority and if the Russian navy were any more eastwards it would be landlocked. Russia has been forced by strategic and tactical failures to resort to at distance attacks on infrastructure and WW1 trench warfare going hedgerow to hedgerow using some of the only advantages it has; more artillery, more manpower & the willingness to sacrifice that manpower. And even with those advantages in numbers against a far smaller adversary using garbage it's still extremely slow going.

And that's just the war to gain territory. Whatever peace follows is when the going gets tougher. It always does. The US suffered the vast majority of its casualties after they won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia hasn't passed the first stage yet.

Even if they kill or drive all Ukraine sympathisers from the parts they hold or even if they take all the way to the Dnieper Russia's still fooked. They'll inherit a cratered mess that they'll have to rebuild. Rebuild with resources they can ill afford. Take sanctions. The mistake often made regarding sanctions is people expect them to have an immediate effect. That's actually not their purpose. What sanctions do is heavily curtail growth and it gets worse over time. The death of a thousand cuts. Now Russia is a major producer of energy and food, so it won't go cold or hungry any time soon and beyond the cities lifestyles have changed little enough in decades, but whatever wider economic growth that happened in Russia since 2000(which peaked circa 2009) that's not looking great at all. Turning large parts of your industrial base to war production makes this worse again.

Note too; BRICS or more to the point, the lack of Russian spin/chatter about it now. Well, within months of this invasion the BRICS bank cut funding to Russian projects. Oops… Sure, no doubt China gives Russia some backdoor tech, but China has her own fish to fry. India is doing what they wisely did during Cold War 1; largely keeping out of it. Brazil is too far away, South Africa is a crisis away from being utterly fecked. For me the more "interesting" stuff around BRICS is actually newbie members in the Middle East. Russia's actual allies? Iran and North Korea. Whatever about the former, that Russia needed to cosy up to the latter speaks volumes, little of it good.

They've also created an independent Ukraine in the mind of Ukrainians and the wider world that didn't exist before. Imperialist mindsets tend to do that. Not least here in Ireland. New nations are born from that kinda thing. Russia is also facing a much expanded NATO and a more belligerent Europe with it. Doh! It's not exactly a great sign when long standing neutral nations like Finland and Sweden drop that overnight and take a side against you and are confident enough to do so.