100 days of war, 3 conclusions

Kyiv, Ukraine — So it's been the first 100 days of what we in Ukraine sometimes ironically call "Putin's three-day war."

Against expectations and general doom and gloom, Ukraine is still around as a sovereign country and is still fighting fiercely, although it has lost a lot. Now, after three months of fighting, Russia has occupied nearly 20% of the territory of Ukraine, a country the size of France.

The war's outcome is still out of sight – but, based on what we have seen with our very eyes on the battlefields of Ukraine, we can already make three main conclusions about Russia and what its war is about:

Russia is not an absolute power resisting which is hopeless

Back in winter, the Kremlin has concentrated nearly well close to 190,000 troops (including nearly 125 battalion tactical groups) against Ukraine, nearly two-thirds of its armed forces. Russia indeed enjoys the numerical or quantitive advantage in terms of manpower, air force, artillery, missiles, and naval power.

But on the ground, in combat, what we Ukrainian have seen is a mass of old and sometimes rather degraded and unmodernized Soviet hardware and equipment. In many cases, poor Russian maintenance and support was a genuine surprise. We thought the Ukrainian military has corruption problems, but the Russian military's condition in the invasion's early days was shocking. Wrong were those who presented the Russian military as an armada of space marines. Wrong were also those who predicted Kyiv to fall within 72 hours.

In reality, as early as April 1, Russia's blitzkrieg had been defeated near Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and the Russian military had to leave nearly 40% of the territories it had occupied after February 24 and concentrate its main effort on just one direction, which is Donbas in Ukraine's east.

It has failed to eliminate the Ukrainian air force, or derail the popular will to resist, and has bogged down in extremely hard and protracted hostilities instead of an easy and quick victory over weak Ukraine. According to the Pentagon, Russia has already lost nearly 1,000 tanks. And that's before the real massive Western military aid, like heavy artillery and rocket systems, started flowing to Ukraine. Russia is a force that can and should be fought.

Russia's military thought is weak 

Many expected a much more sophisticated and modern approach, but no. Russia's basic tactics now, simply saying, is: let artillery absolutely devastate everything on your way, be it enemy lines or a populated city. Then let the ground force advance through charred ruins, at any price. Repeat.

The Russian war has already left a whole range of Ukrainian cities, especially in the east, like Mariupol or Volnovakha, basically razed to the ground, with a civilian death toll not seen since World War II.

All those talks of "network-centric warfare" and "high-precision weaponry" ended up being nothing but talks. The Russian military in Donbas is fighting the way the Soviet doctrine dictated in the 1960s and the 1970s – find a weak spot in enemy defenses and crush the whole of your firepower on it.

Russia's drastic numerical superiority has thus granted it a lot of dangerous gains in Ukraine, at the cost of severe casualties on both sides and great destruction. This is Russia's fighting style, as simple as that.

And that's a lot of progress since Russia's 60-kilometers-long military columns slowly and painfully dashing through traffic jams on Ukrainian roads in an attempt to finally reach Kyiv and organized a frontal attack. Ukrainian mobile defense and hit-and-run tactics in the woods, where those convoys of fuel trucks and armored vehicles are most vulnerable, have been painful to Russian supplies and logistics.

This war cannot be stopped via territorial concessions

Back in 2014, Russia attacked the Crimean Peninsula and incited an 8-year-long war in Donbas — when Ukraine was "neutral" and "not aligned with NATO," but Russia lost its power over Ukraine as a result of a popular uprising. It had in fact occupied three major regional capital cities. Now, as a result of an even bigger invasion, Russia is overtly talking about the full annexation of the whole of Donbas, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions in Ukraine's south as "integral Russian territory."

And it's not talking about absorbing Kyiv, or Kharkiv, or Odesa, just because it failed to seize those cities. Russian appetite for territorial conquests is skyrocketing, as was Adolf Hitler's in the 1930s. So no, any new Ukrainian territorial concessions will only encourage the Kremlin into trying to take even more in a new war. There just can't be a concession "for the sake of peace and saving lives" big enough to make it leave Ukraine alone.

And when the world's biggest nuclear power talks about "NATO threat" and "a preemptive strike against Ukrainian military buildup," it makes sense only to Russian useful idiots in the West. Russia just wants its former colony back under its rule. And then move on to whoever is next.