I don't get the Russian strategy (or lack thereof).

[brush]

6. Putin didn't want a full-scale war, just a "special military operation"...

that could be kept relatively quiet from the Russian public and avoid their daily lives being involved, and thus generating no wide-spread protest movements.

Of course that bs didn't work. And his army was ill-equiped and poorly supplied. Morale was low, training was poor, and then there is the whole structure of the Russian army with one-year conscripts, no real NCO corp to keep discipline in the ranks, and the tradition of out-going conscripts hazing the incoming ones brutally on the way out.

That was never going to work.