Hitler did with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.
Putin has invaded several months earlier in the year, and an article I just read implies he's positioning himself to back off with only the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, because the invasion is bogging down and has thus far not been nearly as successful as this tweet implies he thought it would be.
Problem with going in in very late winter is that spring is coming on fast. In Ukraine, as in Russia, there are two mud seasons, spring and autumn, when travel (invasion) is especially difficult. They are referred to as 'Rasputitsa'.
In these two seasons, travel on unpaved roads or across country becomes difficult because of muddy conditions from rain or melting snow. Rasputitsa also refers to road conditions during both periods, and around 40% of rural villages are not served by paved roads. So the tanks and trucks bogged down.
There have also been reports I've seen of sun-rotten tires going flat on some of the Russian trucks. And stories of Russian soldiers refusing to go.
But yeah, no winter gear and parade uniforms for a victory march? That is the very definition of hubris.
The people in Ukraine are suffering horribly. They lack food, water, and they are cold and homeless. Refugees with nothing when a few weeks ago, they had homes, jobs, food and normal lives. This is the great crime Putin is guilty of. Who has the right to impose this on others?
The thing that worries me is the Russians have been really stupid with the nuclear plants - the fire in the one, and now cutting off electrical power to Chernobyl. I visited Russia back in '03, twelve years after the old Soviet Union fell. In the hinterlands, they no longer turned on the streetlights in the cities because the municipal governments couldn't afford it, and the parks were ungroomed. It was a scary place then, and Putin was not well liked, at least among the people I was with. I was told that when Chernobyl blew last time, many people died (not just 31, which is the 'official' death toll, but hundreds of thousands). Now those cooling rods will heat up again when their generators run out of fuel.
Talk about fucking stupid. Little kids gunned down, hospitals and schools targeted, old people in wheelchairs freezing in the snow, people huddling in subways, clogging the roads, fleeing with what they can carry.
Why? Why? We've conveniently and pointedly ignored these consequences when we marched into Iraq and Afghanistan because hey, we're Americans, and we were exporting 'democracy,' but now we see Putin doing the same thing and are horrified because the Ukrainians are much more like 'us' than the Iraqis or the Afghans. We should be horrified, though, at all war, because war is stupid. Sometimes you have to fight, like the Ukrainians are, when attacked. We need to be opposing Putin strongly every little step of the way.
But to invade somebody else? The only people benefitting from this are the shareholders of corporations that supply the weapons. No one else. It is governments that wage war, not people. People are victims.
When, we must wonder, will we grow up as a species?
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