

These are good questions, and i’ll try to answer them as best i can as a certified SMO-watcher since spring ‘22. Russia is broadly prosecuting the war as gently as possible. War remains a horrific sacrifice of human life, but Russia has almost totally avoided striking major civilian infrastructure, let alone civilians. The only major incident i can think of is the TV broadcast station in Kiev. They constantly attack power switching stations, but not power plants. Ukraine has almost no functional transformers or switching stations, and many parts of the country have 16 hour rotating blackouts. Russia did not strike heat and electrical generation until this last winter. Now, why is this? Some people say it’s a combination of optics and the sense of fraternity between Russians and Ukrainians. More cynically, you could say they want to keep a state around to negotiate with and don’t want to further encourage the formation of Ukrainian ISIS.
Many NATO military theorists really only understand manuever and big arrows on a map. Attrition, that is the exchange of matériel until one side can’t continue, is seen as a failure or defeat state. Any NATO general caught in such a “trap” would try and force some kind of breakout to regain initiative. It would be disingenuous to say all Western military planners are incapable of understanding other ways of warfare, but the journalists and analysts definitely do not. The Western commentariat have created an alternate reality, where Russia promised to win the war in three weeks, but the map lines have actually barely moved because of NATO. In warfare between people of roughly equal or similar capacity, you cannot fight or breakout beyond small, well-planned actions of combined arms. Taking terrain would involve sacrificing personnel and equipment for almost nothing. There are individual tree lines and villages that have seen excess of ten thousand casualties in Eastern Ukraine. This chipping away strategy is a reflection of a lot of new technological developments in war, but the end result is a slow and grinding conflict.
This leads into your next questions, why would anyone want a slow and grinding war? The fact of the matter is that Mr. Zelensky is not freely governing his country, and there are significant Banderite neo-Nazi factions in Parliament, industry, and especially the military. The Azov Nazis and their ilk would assassinate Zelensky, and really any President, who tried to settle for peace. They nearly negotiated peace in Istanbul in ‘22, but Ukraine shot their own negotiator. For all that Russia is a reactionary shithole that hates queer people, they sincerely meant “de-nazification” as a major war aim. Until the people who actively want millions of Ukrainians to die in a bid for ethno-nationalist glory do not have money, guns, or influence, the war will continue. For better and mostly for worse, this means the war will continue for the foreseeable future. A decapitation strike like you’re imagining wouldn’t be aimed at Zelensky or many MPs, but at milita commanders and fascist propagandists. These people are embedded into society, and have moved themselves into the back lines or blocking positions to escape death at the frontline.
SMO is Special Military Operation, which is what the war is called by Russia. This is partially a reflection of Russian military law (peacetime units have all the stuff but not all the infantry, and the ability to mobilize roughly scales with the threat) and jokingly pushing back on the media always saying “full scale invasion”. In real life, i say “the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War” as often as i can.
Do the Nazis have a plan? Probably not a good one. That said, the negotiator in Istanbul was associated with the Zelensky government, and he was assassinated by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Could they actually get the President? Maybe not, but at this point the Nazi militias have been integrated into the security services, so they might have inside information.
Way back in 2022, the official case for war included demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. Prior to the war, Ukraine had the second largest armed forces in Europe (after Russia), with over 500,000 men in the field. NATO/ the West is light on infantry and heavy on planes, spies, and bombs. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they have a large army.
For a decade up to the war, ethnic tensions in Ukraine were rising with CIA backing, and it explicitly targeted Russian speakers. The reality on the ground is that two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, formerly of Ukraine, are mostly Russian speaking. The language was banned in school and then in public, and there was regular artillery shelling of civilian centers. The Azov and other militias built up their influence there, not during this war. It’s less about Russia having a plan for after the war, and more that the security threat of Ukraine comes from how influential violently anti-Russian neo-Nazis are within the state. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they are ideologically anti-Russian.
Russia has tried several Nazi militia members taken as prisoners of war. i think they intend to kill or imprison as many as they can get, purely because it’s a material threat to their state. If the Ukrainian military is defeated and neo-Nazi hierarchy remains, NATO will support Ukrainian veterans becoming a decades-long terror threat