But why though? Surely winning a the war quickly would be in their best interest (blitzkrieg), and that usually means using your best gear, as every extra stalemate day means insane financial losses from the sanctions and time for your opponent to get reinforcements and beat you.
Maybe the Russian army is just poorly equipped after all, and all that gear flashed in the red square during the national parade was just for show.
I’ll grant that’s a decent opinion and shows an appreciation of history but let me ask why would someone be sending a four generation old tank onto the battlefield at all?
It's a super strange context. One of those two things seems to be true.
Either Russia's military is badly dilapidated, possibly with a lot of their supposed upgrade funding having been siphoned off by the klepto state. Putin may not even know just how bad it is, they certainly would avoid telling him if they could. So the invasion force is representative of their normal military capabilities, which are apparently mediocre.
Or they sent in the weaker forces first, including the younger conscripts (which keep showing up getting captured) and inferior hardware, as perhaps a draw-out maneuver.
It's possible Putin didn't want to put his best gear and soldiers at risk initially if NATO decided to launch a counter attack in response. I assume Putin is quite paranoid and delusional to an extent; he may not believe NATO would attack, but he also might not want to fully bet his military on that guess. He may have been wanting to see what moves would be made against him by NATO / EU / US first, before committing further to load his best into Ukraine and put it at high risk. Those forces would be very exposed moving into Ukraine. That would just be prudent conservatism on his part, thinking that Ukraine couldn't put up much resistence and he might have believed the weaker initial wave would be enough to take Ukraine regardless (supposedly he's quite upset about the rate of progress, so either way he underestimated Ukraine if that's true).
