My suspicion, which has been reinforced by Russia recruiting fighters from Syria, is that part of Russia's problem is that they have no idea of how to actually capture cities. Their doctrine appears to be mostly capable of two things. 1) March into a town or city unopposed by any military force and take control. 2) Bombard a city until all military resistance or potential military resistance is dead or has fled, then march in and take control of the ruins.
Actual street by street fighting and building clearly doesn't seem to be something that they're prepared for. Thus why they keep stalling at major cities that offer resistance and moved to bomb and shell them. With Kiev in particular being a problem because they want to take it more or less intact as an administrative center that's had all its infrastructure and administrative records destroyed isn't going to be useful for a long time.
Thus Russia recruiting foreign fighters from Syria. They're hoping to get some people who have actual urban combat experience to help them take the cities without entirely reducing them to rubble. Either to show them what to do, or so that a bunch of non-Russians soak up most of the massive casualties that Russian officers expect urban fighting to generate.
>Actual street by street fighting and building clearly doesn't seem to be something that they're prepared for.
Who wants to do that?
>Thus why they keep stalling at major cities that offer resistance and moved to bomb and shell them.
How is this different from any other modern military?
>With Kiev in particular being a problem because they want to take it more or less intact as an administrative center that's had all its infrastructure and administrative records destroyed isn't going to be useful for a long time.
Hence a siege.
>They're hoping to get some people who have actual urban combat experience to help them take the cities without entirely reducing them to rubble. Either to show them what to do, or so that a bunch of non-Russians soak up most of the massive casualties that Russian officers expect urban fighting to generate.
Perhaps, but then again Russians saved the day for Assad's forces after ~100,000 Syrians were killed. Russia is did that with similar tactics they are employing now.
What I have seen from the gathered Ukrainian footage is that Special Forces units of the National guard and whomever they have trained with western weapons are ambushing Russian convoys in an attempt to cause disarray, but the Russians just have too many units and too much of an advantage in terms of manpower and munition quantities.
Considering the fact they've secured multiple cities already, what makes you think that they don't have a doctrine for this without relying on syrians?
