Curious, some of the analysis around the current military situation in Ukraine. The Russian military has been involved for over a week now and yet has not managed to subdue Ukraine. There's been questions as to where its air superiority is. Some are suggesting that there's deficits in the Russian army. Fred Kaplan of Slate is a usually reliable and sceptical observer of matters military. Very possible, who can tell? But Kaplan notes that these matters usually are self-correcting if one has large enough numbers of troops and weapons.

This isn't to say that the fighting where it has taken place hasn't been bloody, by the Russian's own account "498 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine and another 1,597 had been wounded since the beginning of Moscow's military operation there, according to Russia's RIA news agency." But a few straws in the wind.

The photographs of Russian columns wending their way to Kyiv are omnipresent - one military analyst in Russia suggests that it is actually stuck in mud and unable to move (in part due to melting snows - which would certainly be an ironic turnaround on the usual way wars in that part of the world in Winter go). A comment was made in the media that the Ukrainians aren't taking out the column for fear of accentuating the military response. And as noted on here before there's a sense of the Russians being more restrained - though that term is of dubious utility in a military context - than in other locations they have engaged in. This could be a political calculation. After all, even if the framing narrative the Russians seek to use is one of denazification and demilitarisation then it is difficult for them to go in hard against a nation with such obvious close ties to their own. Levellling Kyiv does not send the right message in that regard. So perhaps there's a deliberate slowness to this.

The military analyst above argues that ""bad military planning" on the northern front has resulted in Russia's attack "faltering"".

But he points to something else:

"Apparently they believed or maybe had some tacit agreement with some Ukrainian military or opposition that there's going to be some kind of swift surrender - Putin said publicly the military to over topple and then he'd have agreement with them," he said.

That's interesting. Indeed the Guardian Today In Focus podcast noted how Putin from the off thought of Zelenskiy as a joke. The point was made by Luke Harding that from the Russian perspective he was not regarded as a system man - someone who had come up through the political or security apparatus and therefore was treated both with condescension and mistrust shading into outright hostility. It's always dubious to apply psychology to public statements but the words Putin spoke about "Neo-nazi's and drug addicts" in the Ukrainian government did seem to be oddly vehement as well as strangely phrased. In no way making light of the intent the 'drug-addicts' line sounded like a rather out of touch ageing individual.

So the idea that the Kremlin crew thought that the mildest application of force would be sufficient to dislodge Zelenskiy and co. does ring true.  And it surely points up the inability of so many nationalists, particularly large state nationalists - though no exclusively, to understand others adherence to their own nationalism.

So yes, all this is a mess, perhaps Putin thought the Ukrainian leadership would do a deal or a runner (and in truth reading this it's not as if it was unprecedented for their to be shifting loyalties in the east of Ukraine).

But now the question is how patient is Putin, how much he is willing to invest in this adventure and how much can Ukraine absorb without fracturing or breaking?

The outcomes to this point - 498 Russian soldiers killed, 1,597 wounded (according to Russian accounts - other accounts see those figures as being much higher). 110 Ukrainian troops killed (according to other sources these numbers are in lower four figures as of now). The UN suggests close to a million Ukrainians are now refugees and a further million or more are internally displaced. Figures for civilian casualties are not clear but likely run into the thousands.

And this is, remember, the largest conventional military attack in Europe since World War Two.