The weight of the evidence is crushing: Ukraine has stopped the Russian army. For the fourth day, Russian foot soldiers have made no to minimal advances anywhere in the country. The Russian military has relied on long-range missile attacks on civilian target--because they know that their troops cannot seize and hold territory, really, cannot fight. After almost three weeks they have seized no key cities. The Russian military is ill-led, its vaunted army, the vanguard, a rag-tag band of lied-to conscripts, ill-trained, ill-prepared, ill-clothed, ill-equipped, ill-fed, lacking motivation, a Third World army, perhaps the equal of that of Chad or Burkina Faso. Putin beseeches China for ready-to-eat meals for his troops and Syria for ready-to-die "volunteer" replacements for his dead. Russia is not even repatriating its dead for burial--to prevent Russian mothers seeing 3,500 to 6,000, or more of the distinctive, zinc coffins known to them as "Cargo 200" containing their dead sons, arriving at airports.
What was thought a "strategic pause" or a "regrouping", of the immense mass of Russian troops north and northeast of Kyiv, a ferocious cat in springing pose, once thought sufficient to occupy all of Ukraine, and that quickly, is now seen increasingly as a paper tiger, a wounded, vulnerable sheep in wolves clothing that cannot advance, that will not advance, that has given up its life to fate and lies prostrate to wait.
"Mom, phone call. For you!"
Volodymyr Zelensky once slinked, terrified, to any safe corner, to tell his people that Russian agents were in the streets of Kyiv and he was their Target No. One. Now, with his permanent five o'clock shadow and military fatigues he looks like a Slavic Fidel Castro and speaks confidently, defiantly, calling on Russian soldiers to surrender. Now, he addresses his nation, and its Russian guests, and the world from his presidential office, taunting the Russians, all but giving them his daily calendar so he will be in if they wish to pay a visit. "I have meetings all day with the prime ministers of Poland, Czechia, and Slovenia, but I'll see if I can squeeze you in noonish?
Putin cannot win this war with this army, not against this people. If he is to conquer Ukraine he will have to do so with missiles and bombs carrying WMD payloads.
