The Ukraine war is exposing how bad the Soviet/Russian model of war is against forces that are a generation or two ahead in only a few critical areas.
When Russia initially invaded in 2014, they pretty much wiped the floor with the Ukrainians, especially once the active Russian military units got involved.
Of course, Ukraine didn't have much of a military at that point, and the military it had was in disarray due to the Orange Revolution, and it was, at that point, still operating on the old ex-Soviet model.
Post Crimea/Donbas invasion, the US and the UK, among others, sent in quite a lot of technical and training assistance, and, apparently, unlike what happened in Afghanistan and the troops we tried to train there, the Ukrainians took to it seriously.
They also apparently were watching and learning from the Armenia-Azerbaijan war in 2021, where in the previous instance Armenia had pretty decisively defeated Azerbaijan, and then in 2021, with the acquisition of Turkish drones by Azerbaijan, the tables were turned and Armenia lost about 1/3 of it's tanks and artillery in a very short amount of time. This conflict was a real eye opener to the risk and deadliness of drone warfare and the utility of suicide drones.
Russia, on the other hand, wasn't apparently paying attention to anything except for how much vodka they could drink and how much stuff they could steal.
Logistically, they ran out of gas 100 km in (which, anecdotally, was one of my friend's experience with Russian peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia - they were always running out of gas and having to be rescued). Apparently their plan was for their Spetsnaz teams to take out Zelensky, their armored columns would roll down the highway on a Sunday stroll and refuel at gas stations along the way, and that would be that. And there was no plan B.
When that failed abjectly, and unable to assemble overwhelming force against Ukraine like they did in Georgia, they resorted to the tried and true tactic they used sort of successfully in Syria - flatten everything with air strikes and artillery. Except Ukraine air defense was still effective, and Russian SEAD not so much, and so things devolved into artillery duels and standoff strikes with cruise missiles and - when those ran low - S300s re-programmed for ground attack.
It was reported that Russian artillery expenditure was/is such that they were using in 2 days the equivalent of the entirety of UK's munition stocks...the war has been going on for 10 months. Sort of puts an exclamation point on how all of NATO except for the US was not capable of sustained high tempo warfare even before letting their militaries rot after the end of the Cold War (this point was further proved in the NATO action against Libya, when a multi-nation NATO coalition was dependent on US munitions to attack a third-rate North African military involved in a civil war).
Based on real world Russian performance, I made the comment a while back to some friends that Russia would have trouble dealing with a single US National Guard division. Certainly the NG division would be trained better and equipped better than even the most elite divisional equivalent in Russia. I do believe that Poland would be able to decisively defeat Russia today (and once Poland takes delivery of all the advanced Korean tanks and HIMARS equivalents, they'll be the most powerful non-nuclear land force in Europe).
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