> How else do you think Europe's poorest country has been able to withstand an invasion from Europe's strongest army so well?

Russia is not the strongest army of Europe. And it never has been for the last decades, as the war currently shows:

- Most of the command chain, not just in the military but especially in the intelligence services has been replaced by yes-men too afraid to report the actual truth to their superiors. Had Putin had decent intel, I highly doubt he'd have gone through with invading Ukraine in the first place, or at the very least with a different tactic. Russian leaders clearly thought they would be welcomed by Ukrainians as liberators, so the Russians didn't start off with embedding special-ops teams weeks if not months before to liquidate the Ukrainian leadership or to destroy critical defensive infrastructure.

- ETA: Russia additionally lost a huge amount of intel in the last years after the Western countries yeeted a lot of their embassy staff for being spies as a consequence of the various sometimes extremely dangerous murders and murder attempts (Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalny, Gluschkow and a lot of others).

- Their equipment is aged - just look at the various OSINT Twitter accounts, most of what is destroyed or taken over by the Ukrainian Tractor Army is old Soviet-era shit. The sightings of any modern heavy tanks or other weaponry are very very low.

- Their equipment is extremely shoddily maintained. The stuff hasn't been moved around for years, parts were taken to repair other equipment and replacement parts been replaced by inferior quality parts (e.g. tires). The result is that stuff breaks down left and right.

- The soldiers sometimes aren't even soldiers. A big part of why the invasion went so sideways so quickly was that the second and third waves were not soldiers - they were OMON or SOBR units, glorified riot cops. Or conscripts being forced to fight in Ukraine. Or ordinary people being press-ganged [1].

- The soldiers are paid shit. No matter where you gather reports from - from Russia over Belarus to Ukraine, there is a common pattern of soldiers selling fuel, weapons, ammo and spare parts for vodka and food, of lootings, of rape.

- The soldiers are completely untrained or severely undertrained. There are videos circulating that show just how much difficulty the soldiers have in driving a tank - obviously they are going to run into difficulties, and they did so when they had to go off the street and into the treacherous half-frozen, half muddy ground. Not to mention the discipline issues from above.

- The soldiers are badly equipped. Partially because vital equipment like encrypted radios or navigation systems have never been bought (because the order got reduced somewhere along the chain and someone bought a nice new car instead), partially because it has been stolen and "privatized", partially because no one gave a damn (many years expired MREs). All together, that makes for pretty low morale and fighting efficiency. And a good laugh if every highway sign points to The Hague!

- There is a massive lack of infantry as it is in every other army of the world. Sending in a column of tanks undefended is a clear suicide mission, and yet Russia didn't have another choice - the result was that Ukrainians, sometimes equipped with literal WW2 panzerfausts or over 100 years old machine guns [1] had it as easy as shooting on clay practice targets... the tanks couldn't fight back, they couldn't move, they were prime targets. Add to that that the equipment is in a bad condition which means in addition to tanks shot down by the Ukrainian Army, the tank columns were constantly stopped by one of their tanks breaking down, meaning that the following tanks were even easier for the Ukrainian Army to blast to pieces.

- Only God knows what's up with Russian anti-aircraft defense. Really. There is no explanation why the Russian Army fails to defend itself against the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones... a fact that Ukrainian soldiers quickly turned into a war song.

- The Russian Army seems to have been a lot more posturing and grand-standing than actual fighting experience. There were regular bloodbaths caused by them over the last decades, yes, but if you look at where the Russians and their goons fought it's no surprise: some backwater piss poor countries with hardly any men and weapons to fight against. Now that they are fighting in Ukraine, which propped up its army and its militia (such as the infamous Azov batallion) since 2014, the Russian Army sees a real conflict for the first time.

And finally, Ukrainians have something worth fighting for, and every war crime the Russians commit only incentivizes them more: their lives and freedom. Nothing what Russia does can even closely match that. The Ukrainians will be fighting until their last breath with every bit of power they have - and their leadership is symbolizing that every single day.

[1] https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/some-really-old-weapons-...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-officials-in-russi...