r/worldnews • u/ArgentineBeauty • 21h ago

Russia/Ukraine ‘We Were Mistaken’: Putin Admits Russia Was Unprepared for Ukrainian Strikes on Oil Refineries

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/83674
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u/Phoenix2111 21h ago edited 15h ago

Yeah, the headline is misleading as fuck. At no point have Russia admitted 'We were mistaken' in relation to preparedness for Ukrainians attack. They just said they were mistaken for 'thinking civilian infrastructure was not a target'.

It's the equivalent of saying 'I'm sorry for how you felt about what I did' and someone claiming you apologised lol.

They're trying to make out Ukraine played dirty, and they were 'mistaken' for thinking Ukraine would be 'honourable' etc. Etc. It's all internal propaganda crap, and they've definitely not admitted the fact that war with Ukraine was a mistake, or that they are in any way unprepared for attacks against 'valid targets'

Which would be better more honest things for them to admit lol

Edir: Given this has a decent amount of responses, and based on the content of a couple of those, just making sure it's clear, I'm not suggesting any kind of support for Russia in this conflict, or that they shouldn't be mistaken for starting it, or that it's actually a surprise to them that these are targets.  At best, they may have thought they wouldn't be, due to assuming Ukraine wouldn't be able to hit them. But frankly it's more likely they didn't give a fuck about wasting resources protecting their people's infrastructure (let's be honest, the oligarchs will have generators etc) and this is just propaganda and saving face to ensure people continue to tow the line as their relatives get thrown in the grinder.

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u/gizmozed 19h ago

Why wouldn't it be a target? Ukrainian civilian infrastructure has been a target of the Russians since almost the beginning.

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u/big_trike 19h ago

But that's different because they were trying to fix the problem of corruption and nazis in government. With bombs and murder.

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u/TheLordDrake 18h ago

You dropped this /s

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u/cab0addict 16h ago

From supreme…I mean President dipshit’s perspective there’s no need for a /s.

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u/TheLordDrake 16h ago

Still useful due to all the tankies that always show up

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u/MyUsername2459 18h ago

They simply never thought Ukraine would be able to, or would dare to, actually strike Russia..

For a long time, Putin blustered that any strike on the actual Russian homeland would be met with nuclear response.

They never thought Ukraine would be able to launch such strikes when they began the war, and even if they could, they thought their nuclear arsenal was an invincible passive deterrent.

Ukraine called the bluff, and Putin folded. Putin wasn't going to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine.

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u/ClaireTrice 17h ago

Targeting the power grid and fuel reserves has been Putin's calling card, when he isn't busy targeting housing and hospitals...hell, he shelled too close to Chernobyl for heaven'ssake....

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u/impulse_thoughts 18h ago

Why wouldn't it be a target?

The most likely answer is that they simply didn't anticipate Ukraine to have: 1 the range to hit these targets (remember it was only 1 year ago that Ukraine had to sneak in drones hidden in trucks to have the range) 2. to have enough quantities of these long range weapons to effectively target and get past air defenses to hit them.

And by the time they recognized it, they were too late to respond with appropriate defenses, and in enough quantities. Hubris. Similar (lack of) reasoning Trump went into Iran when so many American bases and assets (including Amazon datacenters that were hit that caused widespread AWS outages at the time) were in range of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones... years after this war has continuously shown the effectiveness and long-range abilities of the exact same cheap Shahed drones.

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u/ourlittlevisionary 18h ago

IIRC, Russian forces took over the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and dug up trenches stirring up radioactive dust while holding civilians hostage. Then they retreated. Then one of their combat drones struck the confinement shell on reactor 4, damaging the shell and starting a fire (thankfully, there have been no signs of an increase in radiation from that attack).

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u/I-Like-To-Talk-Tax 16h ago

Ukrainian civilian infrastructure has been a target of the Russians since almost the beginning.

Putin's statement is specifically ignoring this fact and is attempting to gaslight people into thinking that Ukraine is acting inappropriately.

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u/Signal-Painting-5016 17h ago

Well allegedly Ukraine used civilian cites to hide military equipment.

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u/Luk164 14h ago

Kremlin claims so, and basically everything they claim is a lie

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u/Signal-Painting-5016 9h ago

Like any other government

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u/Luk164 5h ago

Not even close

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u/MyUsername2459 18h ago

They just said they were mistaken for 'thinking civilian infrastructure was not a target'.

They never really thought, when they started this war, that Ukraine would be able to do anything to meaningfully damage them.

They expected to win total control within 48 hours, and rapidly annex all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

They expected relatively light casualties, with zero damage to the Russian homeland.

54 months later. . .Ukraine is still fighting, Russia has suffered massive losses where even victory at this point would by Pyrrhic. The best and brightest of Russia has fled. Their entire Cold War era arsenal has been destroyed, and the supposed power of the Russian Army has been proven to be far, far weaker than anyone imagined.