Houses shot to pieces in the Ukrainian city of Borodjanka. Photo: Getty Images
The Ukrainian military expert Oleh Zhdanov thinks that the Russian army command was sent into the forest a year ago with an impossible assignment. “The fault was bad intelligence,” says the retired general. “Especially about the domestic situation in Ukraine.” The Russian military analyst Jan Matvejev, who meticulously explores the war on YouTube and Twitter, also saw that Russian soldiers thought they would be welcomed as liberators, without resistance.