And very shortly after they arrested that woman, they arrested another woman who was simply commenting on what she had just witnessed.
IMO - Putin may be on his last legs. Unfortunately, that probably means he'll make things worse for everybody.
If there's any "good news" here, it's that Putin is now soliciting China for military help in Ukraine, which could signal he's worried about having the resources to handle the occupation of a country where the citizens are not amenable to his charms, while having to spend lots of time and energy and money trying to keep the lid from blowing off at home.
It could also be an old Cold War play to make it look like he's got more support than he actually does.
So far, I think Biden and NATO have done really well. The shooting is confined to one place, and while that's extremely shitty for Ukraine, it's something we need to continue to concentrate on.
There's always the danger that things could get a lot worse because an asshole bully like Putin will keep testing the west, pushing to see where we draw the line - if we draw the line - and we could eventually get a much wider shooting war anyway.
Everybody always points back to Chamberlain and Munich, and they always say you have to smack the bully in the face as hard as you can, or he'll just go on pushing, and by the time we wise up, we've lost the initiative and he's knocking on the door of world conquest and blah blah blah.
I've said this my own bad self, but here's the thing: weapons of mass destruction. Nukes. Bio. Chemical. Russia's got it all, and we know Putin is not exactly shy about using them. There's already some reports of white phosphorous munitions being used on Ukrainians
So yes, we have to smack the bully as hard as we can, but we have to do it in ways that don't
give him anything concrete to justify escalating beyond anyone's ability to pull back and calm down.
Throw in the fact that Putin has already just made shit up and thrown a bunch of it in the air anyway, and it's easy to see how easy it'd be to stumble into a Dr Strangelove ending.
Suffice to say
- We can all be glad it's not me having to make these decisions
- It's good that we've got some real pros on hand to do this work for us
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