100 days of Russian invasion in Ukraine: this is how long it took for other invasions to succeed

@ElentirENG ES 6·03·2022 · 7:03 0

This Saturday will be the 100th day since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but some are still reluctant to speak of a failure of the invaders.

Three months of Russian invasion of Ukraine: the reasons to affirm the failure of Russia
Ukraine has captured almost 1,300 Russian military vehicles in 12 weeks of invasion

Yesterday, Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that "20 percent of our territory is under the control of the occupiers." Although it is a worrying figure, the data is far from what the Russians themselves marked when they tried to take Kiev in the first days of the invasion. Russia is still unable to take even the entire Donbass region.

To give us a better idea of the failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we can compare it with the duration of successful invasions over the last century:

• German invasion of Denmark (1941): 6 hours.
• German invasion of Luxembourg (1940): 1 day.
• German invasion of Belgium (1940): 1 day.
• Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990): 2 days.
• US invasion of Grenada (1983): 4 days.
• Japanese invasion of Indochina (1940): 4 days.
• Soviet invasion of Latvia (1940): 5 days.
• German invasion of The Netherlands (1941): 7 days.
• Japanese invasion of Singapore (1942): 8 days.
• Russian invasion of Georgia (2008): 9 days.
• German invasion of Yugoslavia (1941): 12 days.
• German invasion of Belgium (1941): 18 days.
• German invasion of Norway (1940): 31 days.
• German-Soviet invasion of Poland (1939): 36 days.
• Allied invasion of Iraq (2003): 42 days.
• US invasion of Panama (1989-1990): 42 days.
• German invasion of France (1940): 46 days.
• German invasion of Greece (1941): 56 days.
• Japanese invasion of Malaysia (1941-1942): 66 days.
• Allied invasion of Afghanistan (2001): 72 days.
• Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies (1941-1942): 126 days.
• Japanese invasion of Philippines (1941-1942): 193 days.

Thus, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is only comparable in duration to the Japanese invasions of the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, in both cases territories with many islands, which greatly hindered the invaders' movements. The huge Russian losses in the Ukraine are unmatched by any of the invasions we have just reviewed.

Even if Russia had managed to take not just the whole of Ukraine, but even the city of Kiev, it would be a Pyrrhic victory due to the huge Russian losses. But it hasn't even been that way. Russia remains stuck, being forced to make enormous efforts to achieve very limited objectives and assuming losses that do not justify the insignificant results. That someone sees this invasion as a success and Putin as a great strategist can only be explained as a blindness to reality, the result of propaganda or fanaticism.

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Photo: Sergey Bobok/AFP. Three abandoned Russian GAZ Tigr vehicles in Ukraine.