Last night, in another video selfie, Zelensky appeared as in his mugshot: tee-shirt, unshaven. He was alone and said Russian commandos were in Kyiv and he was their number one target and his family second. He looked hunted and frightened. Today he was with his government and looked confident.

A regular army can bleed in urban warfare. If you could you could verify that with Paulus at Stalingrad.

You also fight more tenaciously on your own soil. If you could you could verify that with Lee at Gettysburg.

Those are maxims so fundamental and proved so repeatedly that you could find them in War for Complete Idiots.

-Pause-

Is it not futile? Is the latter Zelensky wise in addition to being inspirational? 

He and his people are not faced with a regular army. Oh, it looks like it, 190,000 foot soldiers, some helicopters and fighter jets and tanks. That's not the whole of Russia's armed personnel. If you could you could verify the bottomless Russian military with Uncle Alf. Putin put in a comfortable, reasonable number of soldiers, not every man. The Russians have missiles and bombers. They could reduce Kyiv to rubble for a pittance of rubles. And they have nukes.

Kyiv to Russians is not some strange, exotic city as Hanoi was to Americans. Russians know their way around Kyiv.

Taking it all, Ukraine cannot expel Russia. The only person who can stop Russia is Putin. And I wouldn't count on that.

There is pride in making an invader bleed. Fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo give women they encounter two options: submit and be raped but not beaten; resist and be raped, beaten and have your genitals mutilated. The two options have only one thing in common.