When Vladimir Putin declared his intentions for Ukraine, he had a large army at his disposal, superior artillery and experience overseeing previous military campaigns.
His neighbour, by comparison, was outnumbered, outgunned and outmatched.
The military assessment from the West was a brutal one: Ukraine's forces would be dwarfed by their enemies in most ways. The reality is they still are.
Yet Russia's defiant neighbour has somehow managed to stymie the former superpower's three-pronged attack. After two weeks of bombardment, Ukraine's military has held up better than many had predicted.
In some cases, they have even been able to stall Russia's advance.
Russia's military campaign, by comparison, has suffered several setbacks and been plagued by logistics issues.
Some troops have crossed the border with MREs (Meal, ready-to-eat ration packs) that expired in 2002, the New York Times cited US and other Western officials as reporting. Others have surrendered and sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting.
So how is it that Russia's military, the fifth largest in the world, was so unprepared to meet such resistance from a smaller force?
Flawed assumptions, possible intelligence failures and low morale may have all played a hand, according to observers.
The Russians underestimated their enemies
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has exposed its military shortcomings, according to retired US lieutenant general Ben Hodges.
One of the key issues so far has been a lack of planning around logistics and supply systems, the former commanding general of US Army forces in Europe told CBS.
Military observers have pointed to the 64 kilometre-long military convoy that stalled near Ukraine's capital Kyiv on March 3 as just one example. Another was how Russia's ground forces became bogged down outside the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the first week of the war.
The Russian military's logistical system "can't support" its own troops, according to Frank Ledwidge, a senior lecturer in military capabilities and strategy at the University of Portsmouth.
"So that gives an opportunity [for the] Ukrainian forces to do exactly what they're doing," he said.
Russia also failed to establish air superiority early on in the war, did not deploy enough troops to execute three simultaneous thrusts (toward Kyiv and Kharkiv, and north from Crimea), and did not properly coordinate fire and manoeuvre, the Atlantic Council wrote on its blog.
Its organisational problems can be traced back to two main issues: outdated assumptions and underestimating the enemy, according to Professor Ledwidge.
Russia thought its campaign would be "fairly straightforward" and built its plan accordingly.
Yet Russian intelligence would have had access to sources within Ukraine to assist with its military assessment, according to Professor Ledwidge, and should have predicted the Ukrainians would put up a fight.
"If reports were being sent forward to the effect that … the [Ukrainians are] quite well prepared, they're dynamic … and that's been the assessment Western military analysts had … it seems that those reports were ignored," he said.
"And that looks like a culture of [complacency] at the higher levels, which we certainly see, where senior command is not given the information it needed, because they're only given the information that they want to hear."
Whether the intelligence failures were due to wilful ignorance, corruption or incompetence, military analysts have been left stumped by Russia's planning failures so far.
Falling for the Kremlin's propaganda machine
For some time, Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine laid the groundwork for his invasion of Russia's neighbour.
Ukraine was supposedly under the control of a drug-addled neo-Nazi elite, its leaders were "committing genocide" and NATO was directly threatening Russian security, despite assurances that it would not.
In the West, these claims have been dismissed as false. There is no evidence of genocide or any supposed neo-Nazi agenda within Ukraine's government. The country's leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a centrist of Jewish origin.
But in a land where information does not flow as freely, where the terms "war" and "invasion" are forbidden by law, these claims appear to have been taken much more seriously.
Accounts of Russian prisoners of war show that at least some members were under the impression they were in Ukraine to "act as peacekeepers".
It was with some surprise then that they encountered intense hostility from Ukrainian forces upon their arrival.
In one account read out by Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, a Russian soldier confessed to his mother that people were risking their lives to stop Russia's forces from passing.
"We were told they would welcome us. And they are falling under our armoured vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass," he allegedly texted his mother before he was killed.
"They call us fascists, Mama. This is so hard."
The text messages have not been independently verified.
But a lack of information about what may be happening on the front line could eventually cause problems back home in Russia.
The angry whispers of heartbroken mothers
Russian parents with sons in the army who have not heard from their children have few sources of information to access, according to Jennifer Mathers, an expert in Russian politics, history and security at Aberystwyth University.
This is where the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers has traditionally stepped in. The group began during the Soviet war in Afghanistan as a network led by the families of soldiers to lobby the Kremlin for their safe return.
"In the 1980s … a lot of ordinary Soviets began to get really disillusioned with the regime in the sense that they knew their sons were fighting in Afghanistan and a lot of them didn't come back at all," Professor Mathers told the ABC.
"Some of them came back very badly injured, or with really serious PTSD and the stories that they told about their time in the army — the incompetence of the generals, and the hostility that they were met with in Afghanistan, and so on — began to turn public opinion against the military."
This was particularly powerful given how venerated the military was as the "great heroic institution that won the Second World War," Professor Mathers added.
But it took the Chechnya war, which began in 1994, for the Committee's outrage at the mistreatment of conscripts to spread throughout Russia at a grassroots level and undermine the entire basis of armed forces recruitment.
"We've already seen examples in the recent past in Russia, of society basically turning against the military. And they turned against the military so much that the whole system of conscription almost collapsed," Professor Mathers said.
Already there are reports of mothers, grandmothers and girlfriends searching for information about their loved ones in Ukraine.
One mother told the BBC she only realised her son was in Ukraine when her sister saw a photo of him as a prisoner of war on the Facebook page of Ukraine's armed forces' chief.
Yet the Kremlin's recent crackdown on what information can be reported about Russia's activities means past whisper campaigns will be harder to repeat.
It is also unlikely that "hordes of angry middle-aged women are going to storm the Kremlin and throw Putin out," Professor Mathers cautioned.
Instead, a "generalised sense of unease" may spread from person to person.
"It's likely to go under the radar — it's not the kind of thing that happens overnight — … but it does have the potential I think to undermine the military to a large extent," she said.
"To chip away at its status and make young men reluctant to answer the call, either for conscription or for volunteers, [and] make their families more likely to protect them, and hide them, which is what families did up until recently."
Already, as Russia's campaign in Ukraine faces setbacks, its troops have been experiencing "morale problems", according to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
This could be due to a number of factors, including a lack of training, a hostile environment and freezing conditions on the ground, Professor Ledwidge said.
But another issue could be that some men didn't know what they were signing up for.
'Bewildered' teenage soldiers on the front line
A report from independent Russian website Meduza suggests that some conscripts were made to sign contracts before they crossed the border into Ukraine.
One mother, Maria, told the outlet that she was unable to sleep or eat after discovering her son was sent over to fight.
"I don't understand how the conscripts could be sent to war," she said.
"We have group chats just for the mothers of boys who are serving. And last week, one mother wrote, ‘Why are they sending conscripts?’ The next day, her son got punished by his commanding officer."
Russia's defence ministry last week acknowledged that some conscripts were taking part in the Ukraine war, after Putin had denied it on various occasions.
Conscripts are made up of men in Russia, aged 18 to 27, who must serve out a year in the military. They aren't allowed, by law, to fight overseas.
"Twice a year in Russia, you get a call for conscripts, there's a draft and it sweeps up about five per cent of the young male population. So it's about 200,000 a year," Professor Ledwidge said.
Russia's army also includes "contract soldiers" who sign on for three years and are paid better than conscripts.
According to military experts, conscripts who signed contracts before they crossed into Ukraine would be deemed "contract soldiers", but would not have access to the same training.
Instead they would have received about 12 weeks of basic drill and military training as conscripts as well as additional specialist training.
"[They would have] very little practical experience, and no combat experience at all," Professor Ledwidge said.
"So they've just finished what's called trade training, which means they've done basic training … and now they've just finished their infantry or tank training, and the next thing they're fighting battle-hardened Ukrainians who are defending their country.
"And that doesn't make sense from a military perspective. That's one of the reasons you're finding bewildered young men being captured, or vehicles being left, because these guys are 18-year-olds who were six months ago saying goodbye to their mums."
Recent Russian history also offers some clues as to why Russian soldiers are surprised by what they're encountering on the ground.
According to Professor Ledwidge, previous armed conflicts indicate the former superpower's military command does not trust its soldiers.
"In [Western] military culture, [we have] mission command, … [so] every soldier needs to understand the mission that [he or she] has been given," he told the ABC.
"But that culture … hasn't percolated yet in the Russian army, they simply don't have that culture of mission command, as we call it."
Instead Professor Ledwidge says Russia's system is "very directive".
"If you're not actually told what your mission is … then you're going to find yourself heading down a road into Kyiv being faced with anti-tank missiles, some of your colleagues [will be killed], and you find yourself in a situation you weren't really equipped to deal with," he said.
As these accounts of disillusioned soldiers make their way back to their families at home, either through the soldiers themselves or through messages from the frontline, the military's support could be put at risk.
And the more the Kremlin and its leader resort to the full-scale destruction of their neighbour, the more the resistance both inside Ukraine — and outside — could grow.
