The two conservative old school leaders of the world have made exactly the same mistake.

I don't think they made the same mistakes.

I think Russia's mistake was in assumed that Ukraine would not be able to resist the invading forces, and that the army would quickly realize this and surrender. It was a failure of intelligence and assessment of the Ukrainian military capabilities. There were other factors - the invasion was poorly and quickly planned, not very well co-ordinated among the different parallel forces, suffered from deficiencies in logistical planning and tactical intelligence (ie. poor supply lines and bad maps), and a host of other factors. Russia probably also underestimated the degree of international support for resisting the invasion, as well as Ukraine's desire to remain an independent country.

The U.S. mistakes were much different. Unlike Russia, we didn't want to conquer and absorb the country into our territory. We had a host of goals: i) overturn the existing government; ii) keep the existing government but secure a coerced but agreed-to pact on future nuclear weapons; iii) damage Iran's existing nuclear weapons capabilities; iv) destroy Iran's existing ballistic missile capabilities; v) destroy Iran's *future* ballistic missile capabilities; and/or vi) stop Iran from supporting terror proxies in the region. Of those goals, only iii and iv are directly achievable with the type of air and missile strikes we used - which is why we didn't achieve them.

IOW, Russia failed because Ukraine was sufficiently powerful enough to resist their military operations; while the U.S. failed because even though Iran couldn't resist our military operations, what we were using the military to do wasn't aligned to meet our goals. The Russian military failed in its mission. The U.S. military succeeded in every mission it was given, but the mission objectives didn't lead to the larger goals we wanted to achieve. Two different types of failures.