acrashb

What would a well trained soldier do?  I am thinking they'd go flat.  These guys stayed upright or crouched.  If they don't know where shot came from they can't do effective return fire so getting down as low as possible seems like best response.

An S300 weighs about 500kg, and travels at about 1000m/s. That's about 500MJ being dumped into the dirt (excluding the warhead detonating) which is equivalent to about 100kg of TNT. That's going to make a pretty decent crater just from the kinetic energy.

Well you can have an opinion based on the same data other people have and be proven wrong. Is the writer an advocate of Putin? I would have to see the rest of their writings. I would doubt it. It's nearly impossible come down on one side of an issue and not be call a lacky by the other these days. The world lacks any nuisance. 
Here's the data:
"Russian nuclear threats seem to be working. According to U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the U.S. won’t provide Ukraine with long-range missiles (i.e., over 300-km which are hardly long-range) because, “…while a key goal of the United States is to support and defend Ukraine, another key goal is to ensure that we do not end up in a circumstance where we are heading down the road toward a third world war.”
The writer's info is coming from the Biden Admin. A conservative sort of agreeing with Jake. Maybe refreshing. 

That is a really good way to throw or break a track.  In fact they might have but the video cuts off pretty quick after the hit.

the attack on Kinburn was significant in that it demonstrated that the French and British fleets had developed effective amphibious capabilities and had technological advantages that gave them a decisive edge over their Russian opponents.The destruction of Kinburn's coastal fortifications completed the Anglo-French naval campaign in the Black Sea; the Russians no longer had any meaningful forces left to oppose them at sea.
 
Oh, wait, that was 1855.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kinburn_(1855)

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LOL that last mile.  Man I did not expect that to be the hard part! 
Yet very symbolic timing in the end:) 
So glad it got you in one piece! Is your wife happy with the laptop? 

I don't see how it would be undemocratic for a democratically elected government to allow its civilian controlled military to treat locally, from a position of strong operational advantage,  with a brutal enemy fully capable of inflicting massive civilian slaughter that was effectively holding an entire city hostage. 
The Ukrainian people elected the Zelensky administration in reasonably fair,  open and freely observed elections.  The govs clear wartime mandate is the recovery of Ukrainian land and people at the minimum of losses.
Talking with RUS opposite HQs to free Kherson without an urban fight and concomitant terrible civilian suffering absolutely falls within the remit of the wartime mandate. 
There will always be political attempts to portray talking with the enemy as *"treasonous"  but it's patently false -  the fact of all those Welcome videos versus bloody and slow streetfighting clips, puts the lie to any of that nonsense. 
If this was the result of operational level contact between  UKR and RUS militaries then that bodes far better for the future. It means that the Ivans,  at some politico-military level, are treating Ukraine as a peer. 
Ukraine has forced respect and engagement on some sector of the Russian political landscape, which is absolutely not the Kremlin line. 
 

Well guys, at last I got this!  Symbolically in the day of Kherson liberation ) 
Thank you @Kinophile for this initiative and enough "family diplomacy" in resolving of sudden obstacle on "last mile" 😀
Thank you @Battlefront.com - Steve, your "bribe" ) will be worked out ))))
Thank you all, who donated anonymously
Thank you, all other, who just have been reading and support our country - first two months were some nervous and psychologically hard, so this my 24/7 "marathone" here was giving me some emotional relief. 
 

I'm starting to wonder if we are seeing the first signs of the RA trying to have something of a military left when all this is over. This is all just speculation, but at this point in the war, some Russian general somewhere has to be thinking about trying to preserve what little conventional strength they have left.

Russians must be in awe of UKR organizational talent. Not only did they manage to capture a city that voted 99.99% to be annexed by Russia without a fight, they even managed to bring along hundreds of civilian crisis actors to cheer them on while they strut around in the place.

Whelp that'll do it.  Pretty standard for the last one out to turn out the lights.  Still not entirely clear but this whole thing has an "ending with a whimper" feel to it, as opposed to a clever trap or valiant last stand.  Could be some holdout positions but it kind of looks like the RA doesn't have the human capital to throw away on a hopeless urban slugging match.
So I can see some are disappointed here, but once again - check your metrics.  The bad news is that the RA appears to have adapted to retreating and can do so in a more orderly fashion.  The good news is that the first real sign of RA operational learning is within the area of retreating.  Offence was a hard fail, defence looks pretty shaky, but retreating is off to a solid start.
So before everyone gets all glum let take a hard look at this whole thing:
Tactical/Operational - While not being able to bag thousands of PoWs, and sending another few thousand RA troops face down out to the Black Sea is disappointing, let reflect a moment on the tactical and operational achievements of this Fall.  First the UA managed to stage two operational offensive on both ends of a very long front, simultaneously.  This is an incredibly hard peice of work.  The logistics coordination and synchronization of operational support and enablers is truly epic - I have zero doubt the post-war analysis will show this.  We all saw Kharkiv, as the UA crushed the right flank of the famous Russian "encirclement" in the Donbas.
Next, for Kherson, I would really like to see an accurate comparison of force ratios in what just happened.  Because I am willing to bet very good money that they were nowhere near 3:1 for the UA.  In fact I would not be surprised to see them inverted the other way on paper - the little guy just kept crushing toes until the big guy left limping.  This breaks a lot of rules of warfare as we understand them (again).  This is not small in the least and it makes the case for corrosive warfare as being highly effective in both defence and offence - fog eating snowmen in either direction.  This operation did exactly what such on operation of infiltrate - isolate - fix/finish - repeat should, it went slow...and then it went fast at the end.  I fully I admit that I was getting worried there for a minute as well as perhaps the RA had finally proven that the entire theory was weak on the offence, and the potential to freeze this conflict was more real, but Kherson just put another nail in that coffin.
Finally, the very good news is that so long as 1) the RA cannot adapt at levels outside the scope of this war (e.g. C4ISR) and 2) the UA are sustained and supported to keep doing what they are doing = it won't matter where the RA digs in (with maybe one exception), this approach can be repeated.  It is only a matter of UA concentration of focus.  The RA can put in massive obstacle belts but I am not sure they will even work against the UA's approach.  Also, even though we did not get the bloodthirsty itch scratched at the end, do not forget just how much damage was done to the RA in this sector before they decided to pull out - the RA has continued to lose things they cannot get back.
So by other metrics the UA Fall Offensive will be one for the history books.  Beyond it being an incredibly ambitious and bold set of offensive operations - both were successful on many levels. I await what happens next with bated breath.
Political/Strategic - Massive victory - I mean Trafalgar Square massive in this entire Fall Offensive.  All war is communication and negotiation - and the UA might have just changed the narrative of this entire war for good which will directly impact the outcome.  This is no longer a war of Ukrainian survival, it is one of liberation.  By re-taking a major regional capital the political pay off is potentially immense with the strategic narrative in the west, we love a winner and we love a freedom fighter.  Up until now - even though everyone here knew it was about liberation since the spring/early summer, as did everyone in Ukraine - I suspect the mainstream west still saw this through the lens of survival.  Kharkiv was cool but it might have just been a fluke.  If spun right, and I suspect it will be, Kherson should be pivotal in shifting that perspective towards "freedom for all freedom loving peoples" (insert music) - the entire narrative has potential to upscale (there is that word again). OR there is a possibility that the west goes "ok, well they proved their point lets tie this off so I can worry about the price of my Cheetos" - gawd I hope it is the latter.
So What?  Well it should reinforce external support and possibly shift the pressure of tying this off "right now" towards something else.  I am not sure it means the entire Donbas and Crimea back in the sweet loving embrace of Ukraine by next summer, we have discussed this at length and I am still not entirely sure it is a good idea - at least not immediately.  However it has very likely bought Ukraine time and options, while taking time and options away from Putin.  Putin and his cronies should be looking out the window of the Kremlin right now saying "damn, we are in a tight spot!" 
Finally, something I have been thinking about a lot, beyond options, is alignment.  Ukraine has near perfect alignment between its micro and macro structures - Russia does not, and for them it is getting worse.  That alignment serves as the foundation of collective Will.  Now how that alignment is created, reinforced and sustained has filled volumes of books, but right here and now it is clear that one side of this war is very different from the other.  All that is left to screw up is the third party's alignment in this war - the West.  We have been analyzing this instinctually but the alignment between the macro and micro social spaces in the West with respect to this war are likely going to determine its outcome - unless Russia totally implodes and then we have got a whole new set of problems.  So What?  Tell your family, neighbors and friends the good word - the micro-social space starts in your own living room. 

{Apologizing for a very long post up front - proceed at your own risk}
Ok now we are getting somewhere.  There is ample evidence that in 2014 the RA surprised the world in that it did not actually suck, there is your citation above and then from the references I posted:
"The Ukraine conflict has been described as “World War I with technology.”11 One aspect that stands out in the Ukraine conflict is the Russian employment of indirect fires. Combining separatist and regular BTGs, Russia has effectively degraded Ukrainian military forces with long range artillery and rocket fire. Russia’s preferred concept of operations has been to keep its fires units at a safe distance, while relying on drones, counter-battery radars, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to target over the horizon.12 The observed combination of increased range and precision tracks with a general trend noted worldwide, particularly with multiple rocket launchers. As a result, Russia has on numerous occasions successfully blunted Ukrainian operations while avoiding significant casualties. Ukraine, on the other hand, is estimated to have suffered 80% of its casualties from artillery fire.13 The increased lethality has required fewer rounds, yet Russia has also demonstrated that it retains the ability to mass large volumes of fires when necessary."
"A defining feature of Russian fires has been their speed. Ukrainian units report that once a
Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is spotted they may receive artillery strikes within
minutes."
https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf

 

These by Karber - there is no grey area here and plenty more which we could fill pages with.  Yes, the Russian proxy forces did suck but these were not Russian "hybrids" by any stretch, it was not until summer '14 thru winter '15 that RA conventional forces got fully in the game, and even then highly constrained because - denial.  Once those conventional forces got into the game they appeared to largely dominate the battlespace and a series of major reversals on the UA ensued.  
This surprised the hell out of everyone - I was in FD at the time - because exactly as you note "Russia has been sucking" at conventional war since the end of the Cold War, from Chechnya thru Georgia.  Suddenly this yokel military was doing things that we could not do, particularly with integration of tactical fires.  But...and it is a big "but" (tee hee) even Karber saw some holes that point to the fact that all was not sunshine and roses on the RA side:

Ah ha!  To my old eye this speaks to 1) lack of PGM integration and 2) a rigid system that can deliver very fast but lacks agility to switch on the fly.  So what?  Well in the intervening 8 years the UA adapted to highly dispersed and more mobile warfare.  There is a lot more out there on how in 2014 the Russian's did not suck tactically and even hints they got their act together operationally - but nowhere near enough for 2022.  Finally the results also speak for themselves as the outcome of the war was clearly a Russian win - even with only gaining half of the Donbas, the Russian failure was translating a tactical win to a strategic one.  In fact it appears that Putin simply "post-truthed" the entire thing and called it a strategic win, when it was not.   We could fill a lot more forum space on this but in the end Ukraine was not cowed and subserviently accepting Russian dominance, they pivoted heavily to the west - we started our training missions there then - and conducted major military reforms exactly because they had suffered battlefield defeats.  It is on Putin and Russia for 1) giving Ukraine the breathing room and 2) convincing themselves of their own superiority.  Both factors led directly to the debacle of this war.  In fact Putin likely set in motion the very reasons for this war - a westward facing Ukraine looking seriously at NATO.
So rather than playing "Russia Sucks" and "No It Doesn't - UA rulez" because it is frankly going to get us nowhere lets have a conversation on what the real issue is in the early assessment of this war and why it went largely wrong.  I offer it had nothing to do with "Russia Sucks" or "Russia Rulz" and everything to do with two key factors in the analysis - context and scaling, the pitfalls of effective military assessment. (that is right folks, the deep truths are very often the least sexy).
So the primary issue with pre-war assessments - and I am talking for both the west and Russia - as far as I can can tell is that they took the tactical performance of the RA in 2014 1) out of context, 2) failed to properly understand the challenges of scaling and 3) applied very poor alignment of that scaling.
So what is The_Capt talking about?
Well context is the first daemon people did not slay.  Karber glanced off it and many cautioned against directly translating the phenomenon of 2014 over to this war but it looks like everyone did it to some extent anyway. 
In other work we studied global pandemics for various reasons, the fact we were in one being the primary, and we found that pandemics are not unlike wars when looking at macro and micro social constructs.  It causes similar tensions, vertical and horizontal, and reaches deeply into human psyche.  But that is not my point here, the major conclusion was that pandemics are like wars in that each has commonality between events but also is each unique in its context.  There will only ever be one COVID-19 pandemic.  In ten years COVID could take a twist to the left and do its gig, but the context will be very different.  Primarily, it would occur in a post-COVID 19 world.  The trick in pandemics and wars is being able to identify what is a trend and what is an isolated phenomenon, and how we do this is through careful analysis of context.  
So the 2014 war was very small by the standards of this one.  Russian involvement at the strategic level had major issues - one of which I just explained up there.  Russia demonstrated acumen in strategic subversive warfare - and frankly I have read and heard plenty that we probably over estimated this as well - however, they had no strategic follow through and displayed a lot of poor assumptions and biases both going into and out of 2014.  It was no strategic masterpiece and we should have expected a strategic mess in this war as this was a visible trend from way back to Chechnya.  Further it was made unfixable largely due to political interference.
Next, there were signals that at the operational level the RA was still operating under an old ruleset.  My take away from Steve's posted citations was likely problems with the RA logistical system and the lack of operational enablers.  The Russian issues with operational level of warfare were not really that evident but there were plenty of indications that all was not perfect either.
Tactically, we have already discussed at length but here is where context left the building.  Ok, so 4000 RA conventional troops summer '14, which is what? about 3 BTGs? - managed to score some pretty impressive points against a military that was clearly not prepared for what they brought.  But this does not immediately translate to the entire RA, nor does it mean the RA could do this at a different scale.  Assessing tactical success or failure without context is nearly useless - we learned that in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the hard way.  Further onto the real punchline - tactical success or failure without full understanding of scaling is not useless, it is dangerous as hell.
So scaling can go up or down, and the major failure in understanding this war from a lot of the experts was the assumptions on scaling the RA in both directions.  First there was taking the tactical performance in 2014 and upscaling it.  It was a huge leap, and frankly pretty amateur for the pay grades of some of these experts, to take the observed RA tactical "wows" and upscale them through the operational level to the strategic. The level of complexity and investment to make those "wows" happen on a larger scope and scale, let alone synchronize them is a challenge for the US military who is spending the most on military capability in the history of our species (ok, and before the Prussian, Mongol and Spartan lovers jump in...per capita exceptions accepted...gawd, I hate all you so much).  It was an enormous leap of logic to think that Russia would walk out of phonebooth as a super-military able to do something the US and western allies would think twice about - the upscaling challenges were (and are) frankly humbling.
Now because chaos rules in this universe, it is a bit less of a leap to say badness upscales, I will give you that; however, it is also a risky venture.  Less so for outcomes but it masks a whole lot of the macro-issues, which frankly if Russia ever did solve for, we should be concerned because by definition it will mean they understand their weakness and can learn from them.
So at the beginning of this war, we had a lot of experts who had spent 8 years upscaling 2014 and then failed to down-scale when the war actually happened...seriously?!  A whole lot of wargames and operational research showed the RA in Kyiv in less than a week.  Wargames in the Baltics showed the same Russian blitzkriegs.  So, ok, lets forget that Russian superiority at the strategic and operational level was in doubt even from 2014, failure to downscale and actually test the Russian "wows" against what they were going to be facing at the tactical level (and we had a very good idea what the UA was capable of at the tactical level - we had been training with them for years).  In the business we call this macro-masking, which is where macro calculus fails to take into account micro-phenomenon across a broad range of samples. 
For example, if all the experts had loaded pre-war scenarios into CMBS they would have seen that battlefield friction had gone up significantly.  So if your dice rolls at the operational level say "the RA will advance in three days", well test out that advance across a range of tactical vignettes and lo and behold it did not go so well because it turns out that global ISR advantage, plus smart-ATGMs, plus PGM against what the RA could bring to the party pointed squarely to rethinking those stupid operational dice tables. 
So what?  Well over here in CM land we were looking for other things than those at the macro-table.  The (very expensive) experts with lot of letters behind their names were watching the big red lines on the country map because that is how they played their games.  We were looking at a lot of abandoned Russian equipment - and I mean a lot of very valuable equipment.  We were seeing a steady stream of hi res UAS video coming out of Ukraine on a daily basis when we should not be seeing anything.  We saw RA combined arms fall apart, right along with their logistics as demonstrated by F ech vehicles out of gas and burning re-fuelers.  It did not take a major leap at this altitude to know there was really loud dangerous sounds coming out of the RA engine room, while mainstream was waiting for Kyiv to fall.  However, we also understood upscaling as well.  The effect of the tactical mess spread along most operational axis was consistent - as was the complete lack of operational integration.  Targeting, air support, logistics and the list goes on - the RA was fighting 5-6 separate 2014s, not a coherent and integrated joint operation designed to collapse Ukrainian option spaces.  
So, so what?  Well sitting around and patting ourselves on the back is about as helpful as circle-jerking does for procreation. I think we have established we were, and still are to some extent ahead of the curve - no point dancing a jig on that one.  What we need to do is fully understand what is happening on the ground on this war, what is a trend and what is isolated context.  I am not really interested in what I think I know, I am interested in what I know I do not know.  For example, the old Capt has gone on about mass...at length.  Well if the utility of military mass has shifted, even slightly, the repercussions are profound - one need only study WW1 and WW2 to see why.  Do the principles of war even still apply?  Is conventional manoeuvre warfare still a thing? Is the tank dead? What the hell just happened?  
The point of a highly distributed collective "brain" as we have developed here on this little forum is to try and understand the events better - to inform and create cognitive advantage.  So this is not about sitting around and feeling good watching RA soldier have a bad last day, nor self-validation or promoting/reinforcing echo-chamber; it is about collective learning about war through what is happening in this one...and what better place to do that than a bunch of computer wargamers with far too much time on their hands? 
  
 
 

my  guess - it is still good for foot traffic or perceived to be.  If you drop it whatever forces are still on the other side are gonna panic.

Well I would not say "zero", in reality the central contest of will is also within us in the west.  Do we want to win or let distractions pull us away?  Russian conventional forces aren't the problem, never were - the west keeping the eye on the ball is the central issue and always has been since the end of the Cold War.  We can get a grip on our crap and get back to stabilizing that order, or keep shouting at and over each other - or worse...change the channel.  
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Durant et al.

I would argue that the game being played here is much, much bigger than this.  This is a contest of wills between Russia and the western global order, the stakes are so much higher than the single nation of Ukraine.  They speak to the course our species will chart for the rest of the century.  If the western global order is finished we are back to the anarchy of states and then a power competition to create a new order which will likely make Ukraine look like a "minor border skirmish".

Hmm, ok lemme try and keep it from getting too weird.  
War is a social exercise and as such social frameworks are very important to its prosecution - I am pretty sure everyone gets that.  It can be argued that society, since the Agricultural Revolution and creation of complex societies, is not a homogeneous mass.  There exist dimensions to society, libraries have been written on this stuff but very little on how these dimensions interface with warfare.
War is a macro-social exercise in almost all war theory.  Clausewitz had his trinity of macro social blocks, and many have used these to describe the fundamental theories of warfare.  By macro, I mean at a state or pseudo state level it is comprised of manufactured sectors of society - government, military etc - this in contrast to organic social structures. The relationship between macro and organic has been touched upon - “skeleton vs cellular” by Appadurai for example. Looking back a war before complex society anthropologist like Keeley write about how pre-historic warfare was tribal and below the “threshold of formation”.  Micro social structures are an ocean of humanity relationships and cultures that reside under the macro notions of a state or other large grouping.  They are your family, neighborhoods and friends - Harari refers to this as intimate communities vs imagined communities of macro structures.
Ok, so what?  Well if we accept that society is comprised of macro structures resting on top of organic micro-social structures then central to prosecution of warfare is the relationship between the two.  We can side step how that relationship affects Will and focus on warfare within these two dimensions itself.  The vast majority of military power is designed to fight within a macro-social context.  Militaries are designed, built and employed as an extension of macro-structures (mostly, but there have been exceptions).  These are designed to fight other macro-structures in a collision as has been described by many. 
Where things get weird is when macro structures attempt to deliver effects into micro-social constructs.  An infantry combat team is not designed to deliver effects within a micro context - beyond blunt approaches of wholesale elimination, which is a very narrow option set.  When thrust into a situation where a military is going to need to be able to deliver effects into this space they have developed specialists and special units.  SOF is most often employed in this space but there are others.  Police forces are another interesting example as they are purpose built to work in a micro-social context “walking a beat” but have to specialize to create formation and function on a macro level e.g, riot control.
”Ah Capt but what about the tactical level, is that not simply a micro-level of warfare”…no, but thanks for asking.  The framework of macro-micro in warfare is not about scale it is about orientation.  A single soldier in a platoon attack is still orientated towards macro constructs of warfare.  A deserter running away from the war is orientated towards micro-social constructs, the difference is not the soldier but which way they are facing and the impact of that on a wider scale is how entire armies fall apart.
Many of our failures over the last twenty years has been an inability to affect those micro social structures, in fact they have turned on us many times.  Sending conventional forces designed for macro warfare into a micro driven conflict is the epitome of insanity.  Clearly the Russias took this into account but then threw those specialized security forces into a conventional war and hilarity ensued.  
This is the tip of a very large iceberg because within those micro-social structures is an enormous amount of human energy.  We kick upstairs to the state but the majority of human energy never left the intimate relationship space.  That energy tend to be very localized and short range but when it boils over and start to emerge as a macro force, well that is when revolutions happen.  So there is a link to subversive warfare in all this as well.  
In the case of this war, the failure in Russian strategy is not only in regard to big red lines on the map, it was a failure to create sufficient effects within micro-social structures to avoid wide scale groundswell resistance, and they have shown no real plan to win these structures over post -conflict - I strongly suspect the level of partisan resistance in occupied has been under reported as has the wide scale oppression.  Finally that fire has a risk of spreading into Russia itself which is what all the talk of upheavals etc have been sitting upon.
Does that help a bit?

Well I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree and maybe things will become more clear when more data becomes available.  I am not seeing any corroborated evidence of above and would need to in order to follow a thread from 2014 to here.  In fact reviewing some of this stuff (again) in context of this war I come to the exact opposite conclusion - the Russians were victims of their own success from 2014.
We can nitpik tactical performance all day long but in the end the RA supported a proxy war and then rolled in pseudo conventional forces in new force structures and were observed crushing an opponent who had been succeeding against uncon separatist forces.  They pulled off two major operations that first pushed back the UA and then decisively defeated the in the field in early ‘15 forcing the Ukrainian government to the negotiations table. In the end Russia had taken the Crimea and about half the Donbas and avoided any real western reaction. I am sure there were observations of RA issues, no military in history has ever had a perfect war, but nothing I can see leads to a forecast of what happened in this war in prosecution or outcome.  To take the position of “well they didn’t take the whole Donbas = they suck” is a serious stretch given the context of the conflict.  Did they want the whole Donbas?  Could they do it without a full scale invasion which they were avoiding see: no western reaction?  
Hey maybe you were the lone prophet, the outlier who saw what everyone missed; however, using your own conclusions to prove your own theories is pretty risky and filled with pitfalls.  Further, I am not sure it sets up a theory that is resilient enough to stand up to scrutiny.  I think “Russia sucks” as a general theory is weak and overly-simplistic for explaining the phenomenon we have seen in this war and will continue to do my part to keep looking for other answers.

Til Valhalla!

Or 3.  You and the analyst were (are) basing your conclusions on incomplete understanding - both parties saw what they wanted to see - and when the coin landed, your predictions turned out to be more correct.  None of this is particularly good news as analysis is all about focusing on what you get wrong and digging into that to get a better understanding.  Self-validation creates a reinforcing effect that leads future analysis off a cliff because "you already have it all figured out".  I would say the mainstream analysis before this war did exactly that, but that does not mean you have developed a universal or unifying theory that will inform the next war based on "see, Russia Sucks".  The missing piece as far as I can see is a detailed understanding of "how and why" they are sucking, which I firmly believe the "Russia just Sucks" camp is vastly over-simplifying.
Ok, off the mark, do you have any supporting analysis or post-action to back any of this up?  Is this your perspective of events or does it align with post-war analysis?  If so, well ok, but here is some counter-narratives:
https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf  I point to section 3 specifically (pgs 8-13)
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1498/RAND_RR1498.pdf  Pages 43-45 cover the period from May 14 - Feb 15 when conventional RA forces were fully engaged to stop the failing of their proxy Donbas forces from LNR/DPR - you can see how quickly the war shifted once the BTGs got engaged and specifically "Although artillery skirmishes continued, both sides took a break to rearm, train, and consolidate between September 5, 2014, and January 13, 2015, when Russia launched a second offensive. Following a second encirclement and defeat at Debaltseve, Ukraine signed the Minsk II ceasefire on February 12, 2015, with terms highly favorable for Moscow." (p45) This Rand document is fascinating in hindsight (note Kofman as lead author) as it gets a lot right in forecasting the weakness of Russian strategic assumptions, particularly in the political and information warfare domain.  It gets a lot wrong with respect to the potential of hybrid warfare, noting it was "inconsequential" when conventional forces arrived on the battlefield (p 70) when the RA crushed the Ukrainian defence.  I think that conclusion led mainstream thinkers down the wrong path at the start of this war.
https://mwi.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Analyzing-the-Russian-Way-of-War.pdf  Interesting peice on the link between Georgia 2008 and Ukraine - punchline the RA learned a lot from Georgia and underwent reforms which led to 2014 success...but not so much in 2022.
And finally the peice by Karber - the guy actually got so close he got hit in an MLRS strike:
https://prodev2go.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/rus-ukr-lessons-draft.pdf
In this peice Karber goes on at length at the effectiveness of the BTG and the emerging "Russian way of War", I know the US military took this pretty seriously, as did we as on paper the BTG could outrange any of our BattleGroups TFs.  We then saw similar trends in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and the mainstream estimate was they would unfold in Ukraine in 2022 - nothing on "Russia Sucks".
So I do not agree that the post-war analysis nor the facts on the ground (see Rand study) support the idea that RA sub-par performance was observed.  The fact that a pretty modest interjection of RA forces in Aug 14 at Ilovaisk ("4000 troops") dealt a major reversal to the UA, and then the decisive defeat of the UA at Debaltseve in Jan 15 forced Ukraine to the negotiation table to sign a pretty bad deal for them (Minsk II).  There is plenty of evidence that the LNR/DPR separatist forces sucked, but Russia was trying very hard to keep a lid on the whole thing for deniability reasons.  Nothing in any of these assessments/analysis (and there are plenty more - Anx A of the first link has two pages of references) point to the pre-ordained abysmal performance seen in this war.
I am not sure what sources you were pulling from to come to your conclusions; however, it might just be possible that 1) all the above mainstream post-war analysis is wrong, and 2) whatever sources you were using were correct, and Russia really did suck...but - the end-state does not support that perspective either.  Regardless of tactical performance Russia achieved pretty much the impossible, it fully annexed the Crimea and over half the Donbas region without a reaction from the West.  The more I read into this, I strongly suspect that Ukraine 2014 was Putin's "Czechoslovakia" moment and he convinced himself the west was so divided (divisions he helped make worse) that we would sit back and let Ukraine fall, so go "full Poland" in 2022.  There is no way to spin 2014 was anything other than a Russian "win" both on the battlefield and on the political stage based on how things unfolded on the ground.
I am afraid that if this served as the foundation of how you saw the outcomes of this war then you too were working with incomplete concepts.  If you had gone into 2014 with "Russia Sucks due to Georgia 2008 = they will lose" you would have been completely wrong.  Bringing that theory to this war does not make it anymore correct - the theory found a war where it made more sense, but that does not make it a workable general theory.  This would be akin to developing a theory "The US Sucks at War" based on its performance in Korea (and there was plenty of evidence in the first year) and then predicting Vietnam as a US loss because "the US Sucks at War" - this glosses over so much nuance and context as to be nearly meaningless.  The mainstream analysis went the other way - "Russia is Terrifying in 2014, so they must be terrifying in 2022", which is not any less incorrect and shame on people who get paid for this work.
So what?  "Russia Sucks at War" is not a workable or even accurate foundational theory in my opinion.  It is inconsistent with observed phenomenon in previous conflicts and fails to take into account the complexities of context and evolutions of warfare over time.  "Russia Sucks at This War", how badly and why is worth exploring in depth, not the least of which is how much the UA/western backed warfare is forcing the RA to "suck".  The very tricky part is to try and distill these reasons into trends that may continue and influence the next war.  There is significant risk in porting over all the observations from this war to the next one e.g. Tanks are Dead - I cannot say if tanks are dead, they appear somewhat out of place in this war but we need to understand "why" before we can say if the next war will see the same thing.  However, I think we do agree that Russian failures and Ukrainian success do not operate in glorious isolation of each other - they have a shared causality with each other.  And the study of that relationship does not neatly sum up to "Russia Sucks", at least not from my point of view. 
 

Fans of Joseph Wright of Derby may appreciate this photograph I found via @WarMonitor3, hosted by the NYT, captioned by him as 'Bakhmut, 58th Brigade':

 

Yes, but the technology for electric quads is here, power armor is still a few years off.

Russia has mad the worst possible choice at literally every possible decision point. There might be one exception but I will get to that last. Russian force design is wrong in about seven different ways, all have been discussed. Russia couldn't afford the army it tried to build even it was relatively well run for an economy of its size. Of course it is in fact run horribly with corruption so severe that if you put it in a bad novel the editor would send it back. Putin decided nothing less than the complete conquest of Ukraine was the objective. Russia made multiple horrible assumptions about its forces, and Ukrainian resistance. This led to a plan even worse than the assumptions. Zelensky turned out to be great wartime leader. Putin didn't have the sense to call the whole thing off at about the two week mark when actually might have been able to get SOMETHING at the negotiation table. Russian war crimes and atrocities have been off the scale awful, and it is ALL on video. Virtually all of these mistakes were required for us to get to the point we are at now, Russia has flat out lost this war, and if they don't quit soon may a lose a great deal more than just their claims in Ukraine.
The one exception to this litany of epic failure was the artillery led attempt to take all of the Donbas in May,that came uncomfortably close to working before the accumulated weight of all of Putin's other errors started to bear down. If Putin/Russia hd been smarter at virtually any of the decision points above they would not be this bad off. 

Exactly.  I did not see fundamental “sucking”, which is the problem with this philosophical point of view - every video is Russians sucking.  I saw a mech RA outfit get totally shellacked by a combination of what I think were ATGM, UAS and really nasty accurate artillery - how they got there is unclear.  
Those two “low intelligence and problem solving skills guys” were likely already in a state of f#cked up, the lack of weapons is a hint, then getting a UAS grenade in the face pretty much guarantee they are pretty much zombies after that.  
This is not a sign of anything beyond the fact that HE to the face makes everyone have low intelligence and poor problem solving skills.  Having been under accurate mortar fire, I can say from personal experience all one has drills and muscle memory when the world starts exploding around you and we were nowhere near as bad off as those sods in the video.
Those clustered guys may be a symptom of poor training but I would not write off inexperience as it is human nature to huddle together in those situations, hard to reprogram that even in trained troops.

Or shock. I'd go with shock.