But just failed miserably on a mass scale. can you go into that? i can. yeah, what has been surprising to me about this operation is i want to remind everyone this was a war of russia s choice. they ve had months, if not years, to prepare for this. they re making a set of critical assumptions proven to be faulty. i think they assumed the ukrainians would not resist them and that proved false. they are making mistakes that they are capable of doing elsewhere in syria. they are capable of having secure communications loops, operational commanders to command things. yet it s almost as if for this operation from the beginning they decided to unlearn a lot of those lessons or not able to scale up more advanced capabilities for a war of this size. for me the most surprising thing has been it took them six weeks to essentially realize that they couldn t run this war from moscow, they needed a local commander to essentially coordinate things.