Surprised? I think most are. Without the threat of Nukes, the Russian military is a joke. They are lucky Ukraine does not have a large number of attack aircraft or long-range standoff weapons. They could have been provided but no one wanted to offend Russia..
What is agreed upon is that the Russian performance is not worthy of the status of the second most powerful army in the world..But at the same time, let us remember that the balance of power is not measured by the performance of armored units and mechanized infantry, but by other strategic factors.
The biggest problem that the Russians fell into was the incompatibility of their combat concepts with the type of war they entered. NATO trained and armed Ukraine not to be able to repel a military invasion, but to be a trap and quagmire for the Russian army..
That is why It is difficult to understand, for example, how helicopters and vehicles were stacked at Kherson Airport, far from its control, without adequate security operations or field fortifications, and the airport is known for its geographical coordinates, and any missile launcher can target it from a range of tens of kilometers!..
Also, heavy vehicles were dropped at Antonov Airport, near Kyiv. It is not know what they were expecting other than bombing the airport, whether the enemy knew the coordinates, type and size of the forces or not..
The forces that storm the cities are inexperienced, their tactics are poor, and there is no security for supply convoys..
The Russian performance is worthy of a major war against NATO, where there is no place but for great firepower, and it does not matter to control the cities as long as they can be surrounded and circumvented and threaten them with surrender or mass destruction..
On the other hand, the Russians also did not advance their best forces, nor their latest weapons, and even the opening strikes of the war were modest, it seems there is a saving in the use of qualitative weapons..
The Russians are using the oldest in their arsenal!!!
And, by the way, the Russian ground forces do not constitute all the forces deployed in Ukraine..
The Russian forces that were noticed in Ukraine are the following:
1- Russian National Guard
Camouflage
The Chechen forces are affiliated with the National Guard, not the Russian army, and this particular branch is strongly involved in the current operations!!!
2- DNR forces
They are the Donbas separatist forces, they number about 44 thousand and are the spearhead on the southern and eastern front..
3- Russian Airborne Forces VDV
They are very active in the Kyiv and Kharkiv fronts, where they have carried out many special tasks behind the Ukrainian lines, most of which have been successful, including the control of Antonov Airport, for example..
The armored forces participating in the battle are difficult to determine to which service they belong in Russia, but there are some factors indicating that they are newly established forces and not professional forces!!!
Final note:
The uniform of the Russian ground forces is the digital flora camo known as
EMR, which is generalized to the Russian infantry and mechanized forces.. there are many variants,,
https://kula-tactical.com/what-camo-does-russia-use