Gone are the hundred days of what we, the Ukrainians, mockingly call "Putin's Three-Day War."
Despite all the gloomy predictions, Ukraine has remained on its feet as a sovereign state and is fighting resolutely, even though it has shed a lot of blood.
There is still no way to see how the war will end, but from what we have seen so far with our eyes on the battlefield, three main conclusions can be drawn regarding Russia.
The first: Russia is not a superpower that has no purpose to oppose.
At the height of winter, Russia had the numerical advantage in terms of manpower, aircraft, artillery, missiles and naval force.
But in practice, on the battlefield we have come to see that the Russian forces are in many cases units made up of outdated and inferior Soviet equipment.
Those who warned that the Russian invasion would be as dramatic as an alien spaceship invasion were deceived.
Even those who expected Kiev to fall in about 72 hours.
Already in early April, Russia's Blitzkrieg was stopped near Kyiv and other cities.
In fact, the Russian army was forced to withdraw from 40 percent of the territories it had occupied since the invasion, concentrating its war effort in only one direction: the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Reuters,
Second conclusion: Russia's military planning is flawed.
Many thought that Russia had a much more sophisticated and modern approach, but this was not the case on the ground.
Russia's basic tactics are reflected in artillery fire on everything in the army's path, even if it is a civilian population, to pave the way for the army to march in ruins.
Then God forbid he comes back.
A number of Ukrainian cities, especially in the east, have already become de facto ruins (such as Mariupol).
The death toll has not been seen since World War II.
All talk of Russia using precision and multi-system weapons remained talk.
The Russian army in Donbas adopted the Soviet doctrine of the 1960s and 1970s: to locate a weak point in the opponent's defense and focus all the fire there.
Russia's huge numerical advantage has given it achievements at the cost of terrible destruction and many casualties on both sides.
A building in Ukraine destroyed in one of the Russian bombings, Photo: AP
Third conclusion: war cannot be stopped by territorial concessions.
In 2014 Russia attacked the Crimean peninsula, and started an eight-year war on the Donbass, even though Ukraine was not part of NATO even then and declared itself neutral. In that attack Russia managed to take control of three regional cities, but now in the current invasion it wants to annex the whole region Donbas, as well as areas in the south of the country.
Therefore any territorial concession of Ukraine will only encourage the Kremlin to bite more of its territory while fighting.
There is no possibility of concessions "for peace and for the preservation of life" that will satisfy the Russian appetite in a way that Moscow will leave us to our own devices.
The bottom line is that Russia wants to control its colony again, then move on to the next in line.
The author is a security correspondent for the Kyiv Independent newspaper
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