https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/02/14/it-s-a-chain-reaction

This is interesting.

«There’s also a third argument: I think that if such a task [starting a hot war] had been set, then it would have been met in completely different ways. Look at how the operation in Kazakhstan was carried out[1] — very quickly, within a few hours. Everything was done without too much pomp — and the 2014 Crimean operation was the same. A modern level of mobility — including [the mobility] of the Russian Armed Forces — doesn’t require the accumulation of troops over the course of several months in order to finally get ready and begin an attack. This is archaic — typical of 1914: a mobilization, troops traveling by rail, and that sort of thing.

Today, in order to minimize losses and demoralize the enemy, they act quickly — before anyone could blink an eye, they’d be marching on the central squares of Mariupol and Kharkiv. What’s happening [now] is too apparent, too obvious.»

[1] (If memory serves, I read a military-science-history-y paper claiming that Russia basically stumbled into Kazakhstan because they gave local military leaders too much control, and have since rectified that problem.)