The agencies competent enough to know (or guess) certainly aren't going to tell anyone. It is absolutely possible to get high on your own supply (of authoritar

The agencies competent enough to know (or guess) certainly aren't going to tell anyone. It is absolutely possible to get high on your own supply (of authoritarianism, propaganda, and shooting messengers). So it is entirely possible upper echelons of the Russian Military tell Putin what he wants to hear because anyone who doesn't gets an unscheduled dose of Polonium. It is also possible they are deliberately slow-rolling for various reasons: legitimate supply line issues, testing the waters, being able to pull back if the west responds too strongly, they really just wanted to steal some territory, etc. Being an opportunist is hardly unique. Perhaps the plan was to invade. If you take the capital within a few days yay: you annexed Ukraine and you'll be done and it will be old news before the west can really respond. If the west sends aircraft carriers and troops you claim you were just protecting ethnic Russians in the border areas. If the invasion bogs down or the economic cost gets too high sign a peace treaty that contains as much as you can get away with and play nice neighbor for a bit while you send in the undercover agents to try another regime change in 5-10 years when everyone has stopped paying attention. Russia, much like the US, hasn't really faced off against a reasonably modern military with good training and decent weapons systems anytime in the recent past. Even though Ukraine has a smaller military they've been pouring a lot of effort into training, arming, and modernizing since the last time Russian decided to invade and take some territory in 2014. And it wasn't like they were rag-tag religious extremists or a guerrilla force prior to that - they weren't starting from zero. If Putin and his cronies really did overestimated Russian military capabilities it is still entirely possible for Russia to win the same way the Soviets survived the Wehrmacht: Massive mobilization, throw bodies into the fire, then slowly slog it out for as many years as it takes. That is an option Ukraine doesn't really have. They can't mobilize the same level of industrial production and they can't sustain as many dead sons. No one really knows if top of the line western weapons would level the playing field vs what Russia's defense industry can make. In the end it might come down to will: does Putin have the will to kill as many Russian soldiers as it takes? Would the rest of his cronies let him if he tried? Will the Russian military accept that? On the Ukrainian side how far are they willing to go? How many citizens will volunteer? How many modern western weapons can they get ahold of? Can they continue disrupting Russian communications and logistics? As far as I know this is the closest to a true military faceoff using modern weapons and tactics as we've seen. Most recent conflicts have been very asymmetric at every level which doesn't make for apt comparisons.