Larch Wrote An Excellent Summary.

Here it is: 

The notion that the southern front was the place to attack was fundamentally flawed.

At stake for the RF was Crimea, the Azov, Sevastopol, the home of the Black Sea Fleet, the Rostov-on-Don GS command HQ, and the quick loss of Transnistria as a follow-on for the Ukies-Moldovans. It also could have led to the severing of the Syrian Express supplying Tartus and Russia's ME operations.

To think the Russians wouldn't have escalated far beyond that battlezone in self-protection of all those strategic assets is a major flaw in any strategy by an attacker.

Chechnya alone would have amassed a rapid reaction force of 5 Brigades who would have carved a hole in the Ukie offensive. A thousand Kalibrs and Iskanders would have rained down on the armor.

Surovikin would have brought his Air Force assets from all over Russia and the Far East if necessary to decimate any breakthrough. He was still the commander of those forces at that time and knew how to use air power against land forces. It was his specialty in Syria.

The US underestimates all and everything Russian. The US war games were a joke and are all over the world where they use them. It begins with 'We are #1'. The other guys are lessers. In this case, the have no respect for Russia. The US thinks it beat the Nazis and it thinks it destroyed ISIS. So, they program in GI and they win with GO. But it doesn't work in real combat.

In real combat, the guys with the shovels and washing machine parts have destroyed a 1.5 million-man NATO-US proxy military. It was the best of the West and it had the highest motivation and strategic defenses planned and in place for eight years. All that has been ground to rust and dust by Gerasimov, Shoigu, the General Staff and the Russian MIC.

Ukraine never had a chance. Devising 'counteroffensives' in Washington and Brussels just added the perfect ingredient for their defeat. Hubris. It is the credo of the US hegemon. Vainglorious bravado and parade ground weapons, unfit for combat, untrained officer corps, triumphal special forces that never experienced artillery barrages like General Dvornikov unleashed on the Ukies from April 2022 for seven months are some of the deficits the war games never included.

Nothing changes in the West's fantastical thought process. They begin with the delusion that they are #1 and therefore all will fall in front of them in a brief clash. They failed to study the truth in Syria and the truth of Mariupol and what Generals Dvornikov and Surovikin had established for more than 16 months before their foolish NATO counteroffensive across wide open, flat killing fields, mined to the millions with impregnable defenses 60 km deep in triplicate.

Just factor in this statistic: 480,000 Russian young men and experience vets have volunteered for the SMO.
The patriotic depth of support is massive in Russia. While in Ukraine, since day one of the SMO, tens of thousands, now likely a million Ukies have fled to Europe. And most of the last years front lines were shanghaied off the streets, conscripts sent to certain death. What war game could produce a victory for the Ukies with those facts in the mix?

The Order of Battle was a huge formation of NATO/Ukie weaknesses against a formidable classic Russian defense of Mother Russia. The Russians had shown they could fight at 3x less the force strength while the Ukies proved that they would need 10x the traditional strength to attack.

Even with an equal chance, the terrain was the terrain of cemeteries of invading forces for hundreds of years. Land operations in that region have bested great armies before.

In this case, Surovikin's mine fields and drones with artillery finished off the Ukies. It was like a beach attacking the ocean. Sand didn't have a chance.

Very good points all around.