Why are they struggling to take the Donbass though
Why'd they initially plan to capture Kiev in 3 days then
>the goal is to minimize losses of Russian troops and maximize destruction of Ukrainian troops and infrastructure
Why do they have to recruit in prisons and offer ungodly recruitment bonuses then
>The goal is not to take land, that what the west doesn't understand.
Why does Putin maintain his maximalist goals and requests the entirety of the Donbass he failed to take as a precondition for a ceasefire then
>At some point Ukrainian lines will crumble and then everything will unfold quickly.
People been saying that for three years. Any time now, you just wait
They went in with 90k troops, that barely enough to "take" even a smaller city like Kiev. The goal was to enforce a political outcome to this acute crisis outside of a total war. Initially, this succeeded with the peace talks in Istanbul and Russian troops retreated. Finally, the West (Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, Biden) promised full NATO support for Ukraine and Zelensky smashed the peace treaty into the trashcan. That's when the Ukraine army started its counter-offensive and pushed the Russians far back into the eastern parts of the Donbass. That's when Russia commenced to a slow and grinding war of attrition with the goal of removing the russophobic Zelensky regime propped up by the West.
> Why do they have to recruit in prisons and offer ungodly recruitment bonuses then
The recruitment bonuses are actually quite good, that's why many Russians, especially from the poorer regions, agreed to participate. Every Russian family lost members in the Great Patriotic War, they know who they're fighting. Recruiting in prisons is actually not just a Russian thing, it also happens in Ukraine (where they're snatching people off the streets) and many other countries in conflict situations. That's really not unusual.
> Why does Putin maintain his maximalist goals and requests the entirety of the Donbass he failed to take as a precondition for a ceasefire then
The economically most important regions of the Donbass are by now already taken by Russia. There is not much between the western edges of the Donbass and Kiev. Russia has no interest in a ceasefire, as a ceasefire only provides time for the West to re-arm and prepare for the next attack on Russia. The west shits on Russia since the fall of the Soviet-Union.
> People been saying that for three years. Any time now, you just wait
That's true, but many people couldn't expect how much support in weapons and money the West was and is actually willing to provide to Ukraine. Without this support this war of attrition would be over by now.
This + the use of 'Great Patriotic War' shows you're not really worth arguing with, but still - you do know people can trivially look up and fact check the bit of fanfic you just wrote, right?
We are talking about a number of around 25 million people killed on the Soviet side. You may go and search for a memorials (for the atrocities to the Russians on the eastern front) somewhere in Germany or allied axis countries (Romania, Hungary, Austria!, Spain!), just to recognize that there aren't any.
And I'm writing this as a German. The great killing on the eastern front is a black hole in Western history books. These are filled with "Band of Brothers", "Omaha Beach", "6. of June", "Battle of the Bulge"... But no one in the West really knows anything about e.g. the Siege of Leningrad with nearly a million civilian death (including relatives of Putin by the way).
People in the West really need to understand where Russians and Chinese people actually come from historically, the 'century of humiliation' absolutely is over.