re: #281 steve_davis

Not a tactician, but dropping paratroopers into a city you don’t control reeks of desperation to me.

My belief for days now has been that the Russian Army badly overestimated their ability to neutralize Ukraine’s AA network in the opening hours of the war. That they had bad/old intel about where SAM and AAA sites were situated and bombarded those first, alongside or immediately before attacking all military airfields where they figured they’d catch most of the Ukrainian Air Force on the ground. Once they’d neutralized those, the paradrops would be initiated into airfields surrounding Kyiv in order to secure those for moving troops into the capital by transport plane. By that point, the tank columns pushing from the north would have either arrived or be near, allowing them to link up with what would be hundreds or thousands of troops in Kyiv to lay siege to the city.

But instead they totally whiffed on knocking out the AA and jets, plus they didn’t really take into account the fuckton of MANPADS already shipped into the country from NATO that would make any aircraft slower than an attack jet vulnerable to interception. So that the first wave of VDV troops were also the only wave airdropped in before the airspace was deemed too hostile to risk further drops. So that the poor bastards that made it into the country were left to fend for themselves.