The Kremlin warned that American support for Ukraine could turn into a decade-long folly, urging the U.S. to not oppose its invasion of the country as Congress appears set to pass a $60 billion aid…
Russian officials publicly assure the world that their invasion will only last 1 week due to their overwhelming military superiority.
109 weeks later without a victory, losing twice as many soldiers and equipment, Russian officials swear that the US, not an active combatant, is going to be so embarrassed.
I was watching an analysis on the 2023 progress of the war. The author said that while he acknowledges that Russia seems to have the favour making the war a stalemate and took more strategic, albeit small, locations than Ukraine did; this leads to Catch-22 for Kremlin that the more Ukraine struggles, the more money Ukraine will receive which is not on Russia's favour.
There's also the fact that Russia never really seemed to account for most of its monetary and material taps getting turned off. When you're (ALLEGEDLY) throwing conscripts out there without even a single full magazine of ammo, you're burning through old post-WWII ammo stocks, and constantly having to beg old SSR states "hey can we buy/borrow some of your tanks and APCs please," it doesn't look great.
The trouble is, the material taps haven't turned off they've been rerouted. Apparently enforcing sanctions is hard and more importantly also pisses off your donor base consisting of amoral business types. You can find any number of articles of Ukrainian complaining (even years into the war) that they find western electronics in downed Russian missiles.