Please explain how this could possibly happen.
Easy. It's an astonishing combination of corruption, incompetence and Mad Vlad's paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
While Ukraine, ever since Mad Vlad started this war in 2014, has rebuilt it's defence with the sole object of fighting this very type of war. With the help from mostly NATO, it has modernized training, strategy, equipment and more.
In the same time, Mad Vlad has wasted 95% on high profile, extremely expensive weapons, meant to be used in a completely different type of war. New nukes, new tanks, new subs, new naval ships, new fighter jets and so on. All of them extremely expensive, none of them very useful in this war.
He failed to understand how important it is to spend resources on the "boring" but basic parts, like providing for the soldiers. He preferred to spend those money on his 500k big secret police fighting a war against his own citizens.
He sent mostly conscripts, who thought they were on an exercise and was poorly motivated, to fight an army with western style education, pay, equipment, accommodations. And those were highly motivated, fighting for family, freedom and country at their home turf.
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