If it's any help I find it best to distinguish between words and actions.
Putin can talk nuclear readiness all he likes, but his actions? Four days in he's got a delegation talking with the Ukrainians. Russia has the conventional weaponry, men and machines, to roll over Ukraine, so why hasn't he done it?
Putin is trapped in the past, he assumed, as happened in so many Western European countries in the early years of the 2nd World War, that faced with overwhelming odds, the government of the invaded country would surrender rather than suffer pointless loss of innocent civilian life. That might still happen here, we get stories and images of plucky Ukrainians, but it's hard to distinguish between fact and propaganda, all countries look plucky against the invader right up to the point they aren't, then knownothing armchair warriors thousands of miles from the action call them surrender monkeys.
The only thing one can say with any certainty is this invasion is not turning out as Putin envisaged.
Putin's appeal to the Ukrainian military to oust their government, so that he can set up a cosy client state in Kyev, along the lines of the one he has in Minsk is the real issue, because that plan is in the shitter.
We're in a world of unintended consequences now, Putin wanted a compliant Ukraine on his doorstep, not a devastated resentful nation under occupation. Ukraine is a huge country of 44 million people, not some tiny statelet in Georgia. He can take Ukraine but he'll never hold it to his bosom,
This war might be playing out on the world stage, but it is not a world war. The world might be supporting Ukraine, but not with boots on the ground. Which means that unless there's a palace coup in Moscow, Ukraine will lose. Soon we're going to find out what the nature of that loss is.
As for Russia? In military terms she will win, but it will be a pyrrhic victory, her principal objectives thwarted.
Churchill was referring to loss of life in the 1st World War when he said this, but it is apt in a broader sense to Russia in this vainglorious war....
"Victory has been bought at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat"
