The collapse of the Russian Army was something no one expected.
Because according to all logic, a full 1.5 million Russian soldiers, even if surrounded by the German Army, should never have been able to end this war in a mere two and a half weeks.
Even if it were 1.5 million head of cattle and sheep left for the German Army to slaughter, it surely would have taken a longer time, wouldn't it?
Actually, one cannot entirely blame those Russian soldiers who seized food from the Ukrainian populace. After all, they had not carried enough provisions from the very beginning; surely they could not simply surrender and starve to death.
Yet the Russian Government clearly did not see it that way.
Regardless of how the process unfolded, the present result was that the 1.5 million Russian soldiers were almost entirely wiped out, which was equivalent to the Russian Government handing nearly one million free laborers over to Germany as a gift.
The fate of these Russian soldiers was already glaringly obvious. To the increasingly unhinged German Government, such free laborers delivered right to their doorstep were certainly not something they would let slip.
As for the Russian Government, the pressing matter at hand was no longer how to resolve the vacant 1.5 million-man force on the southern battlefield, but rather how to quickly find a scapegoat for that southern theater.
This concerned not only the subsequent morale on the southern battlefield, but likewise the relationship between the Russian Government and the Ukrainian region.
At present, the populace near Kyiv was already quite dissatisfied with the Russian Government, with some even spontaneously forming political parties opposing the Russian Government.
This was a sufficiently fatal threat to Russia. Should Russia lose Ukraine, that vital grain-producing region, it would be forced to