I just love how everyone is obsessing over a ~50 year old ship when the Invasion we are supposedly discussing is conducted primarily on land and the other party no longer has any naval assets.
Losing a fleet's flagship while conducting primarily land operation whereas the other party no longer has any naval assets is...
Remarkable.
In the end, it's just another (but highly visible) sign how badly Putin and his generals have miscalculated. This invasion turns out to be a classic case of "small victorious war".
Putin wanted to demonstrate strength to NATO, shore up support at home and strengthen his hand in Ukraine. Instead his military is getting humiliated. If Ukraine can effectively resist conventional Russian invasion, what hope does Russia have against NATO? And what was a decade of heavy military spending for? And the longer the operation drags on, the weaker Putin looks at home. And there is basically no chance of installing pro-Russian regime in Kiev unless at least partial mobilization is declared.
Again - invading Ukraine, a larger and more populated country than Iraq, using merely 100.000 soldiers was a decision without a precedent in modern history. Ukrainian military heavily outnumbers Russian forces in the region, while Russia holds advantage in firepower. Ukrainian military can afford to take losses: they have already declared mobilization and they have nothing to lose at this point. Russian forces are too few as it is, losing those few is problematic to say the least. Which is why Russian military isn't getting anywhere compared to the first weeks. Some progress in the south was bought by abandoning all gains in the north.
The only way for Russia to break current stalemate is to mobilize the reserves - to have warm bodies to control the rear and to plug secondary directions. Of course, partial mobilization will be another humiliating demonstration of weakness. If Putin needs to mobilize to beat Ukraine, then his demands of NATO become laughable. And the enthusiasm for the war, already not that high, will plummet once regular folks start get notices from the local commissar about state-sponsored tank tours to Ukraine. Previously Putin has attempted to pretend there are no conscripts in Ukraine precisely for that reason.
Tell people someone is getting bombed far away because state reasons and people will swallow it. Tell people they have to actually participate and... well, there are some very uncomfortable precedents in modern Russian history.
