It brings to mind the famous clip of Lombardi on the sideline barking: What the hell is going on out there??!!
Russian forces are hours from taking Kyiv. No, make that days. No, make that...well who knows...the columns are sitting on the road 30 miles out while the troops cop some Z's.
Where exactly is the fighting? Five days in. Some buildings wrecked. Some fuel depots blown up. The Russian economy clobbered with sanctions. What was the point?
I understood Russia's pre-invasion security concerns on the question of Ukrainian neutrality, but invasions are like pregnancies: there's no such thing as just a little bit.
You wonder if the Russians based their entire strategy on the presumption that Ukraine wouldn't offer meaningful resistance and that Russian forces would more or less bloodlessly cruise into Kiev, decapitate the Ukie government, and present the West with a fait accompli almost overnight...even before sanctions were ordered up. You wonder if, incredibly, Russia doesn't have a Plan B.
Seen in this light, the dramatic announcement yesterday of the higher alert status of Russia's nuke force could be a move of desperation. As in: Our military command has been exposed as incompetent and our troops mediocre, but hey, we still got nukes so don't mess with us. Little late for those theatrics, Vlad.
Meanwhile, "talks" open this morning, and Moscow shows up with some low-level flunkies.
God knows where all this is going or how in the friggin' world it ends at this point, but the whole thing increasingly smacks of Theater of the Absurd.
Well at least Senile Joe can breathe a sigh of relief. He no longer takes first place on the ranking of world leaders who most badly screwed up the Ukraine crisis. It's beginning to look like that honor belongs hands-down to Bad Vlad. Either that or he really is some kind of evil genius who plays chess while his opponents puzzle over a checker board...
Russian forces are hours from taking Kyiv. No, make that days. No, make that...well who knows...the columns are sitting on the road 30 miles out while the troops cop some Z's.
Where exactly is the fighting? Five days in. Some buildings wrecked. Some fuel depots blown up. The Russian economy clobbered with sanctions. What was the point?
I understood Russia's pre-invasion security concerns on the question of Ukrainian neutrality, but invasions are like pregnancies: there's no such thing as just a little bit.
You wonder if the Russians based their entire strategy on the presumption that Ukraine wouldn't offer meaningful resistance and that Russian forces would more or less bloodlessly cruise into Kiev, decapitate the Ukie government, and present the West with a fait accompli almost overnight...even before sanctions were ordered up. You wonder if, incredibly, Russia doesn't have a Plan B.
Seen in this light, the dramatic announcement yesterday of the higher alert status of Russia's nuke force could be a move of desperation. As in: Our military command has been exposed as incompetent and our troops mediocre, but hey, we still got nukes so don't mess with us. Little late for those theatrics, Vlad.
Meanwhile, "talks" open this morning, and Moscow shows up with some low-level flunkies.
God knows where all this is going or how in the friggin' world it ends at this point, but the whole thing increasingly smacks of Theater of the Absurd.
Well at least Senile Joe can breathe a sigh of relief. He no longer takes first place on the ranking of world leaders who most badly screwed up the Ukraine crisis. It's beginning to look like that honor belongs hands-down to Bad Vlad. Either that or he really is some kind of evil genius who plays chess while his opponents puzzle over a checker board...
