Putin races against clock as fast military advance ‘frustrated’

Bloomberg

Russia’s plans for Ukraine face rapidly rising costs due to delays caused by tougher-than-expected resistance from forces on the ground, even as its military retains overwhelming advantages.
A person familiar with Russian planning said the military would have hoped for faster progress. The Kremlin has declined to comment on details of the military operation, and its Defense Ministry says the campaign has been successful.
A senior US defense official said the US had indications that in the last 24 hours Moscow had become frustrated by slow progress, caused by an unexpectedly strong Ukrainian defense and failure to achieve complete air dominance. Still, with Russian forces closing on the capital Kyiv amid fierce street battles on Saturday, the official added Russia so far had committed only about 50% of its available firepower to the war.
Pushing back against a narrative that the invasion has stumbled and is targeting population centers, a Russian official also familiar with the campaign’s planning said it was on track and designed specifically to avoid urban warfare in cities.
The time frame for the operation’s military goals was between one and two weeks, rather than a few days, after which Ukraine’s military should be crushed and its government replaced with one friendly to Moscow, said the official, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. The official added that capturing cities, with the heavy loss of civilian life that would likely entail, was not on the agenda.
That account of Russian goals largely fits with the analysis of military specialists in the West and President Vladimir Putin’s stated aim of “demilitarizing” rather than occupying Ukraine, although it does not appear to match everything that has happened on the ground.
“Russia still has the initiative, but it is not really achieving the goals it wanted at this point because the Ukrainians are resisting,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based military analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank, adding that Moscow’s leaders may have been misled by their own belief in the strength of pro-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.
A rapid assault of this kind has to follow up quickly on the initial shock of invasion to make clear that resistance is futile, Felgenhauer said. With every day that Ukraine’s organized defense continues, morale will rise and with it the number of people who take up arms as reserves.
That has implications for Russia’s ability to impose control without having to eliminate resistance by force, especially in urban centers, according to Felgenhauer, failing the military coup Putin appeared to call for in remarks at a security council meeting in Moscow.
“The next week will be decisive,” Felgenhauer said, adding that while a Ukrainian military collapse or putsch remains possible at any moment, cities may just have to be taken, an inevitably bloody task and a threat to Moscow’s political goals once the government was replaced. “The Russian plan has a lot of holes.”