The war in Ukraine is reaching, some claim, its decisive moments. After much defeat, Russia is making small gains in the east, in Donbas, which may give them grounds to declare victory—that is, a disastrously destructive stalemate from which neither party can recover for maybe a decade. And, for those who have lost loved ones, never. Putin has revealed his version of Russia to be a Potemkin state, a vacuous polity, a sham superpower, a gas station with nukes and a teenage conscript military of second-hand, second-rate hardware with jowly bemedaled generals in oversized hats. A dozen fewer now. His mission, a soulless, heartless, and not mindless but egregiously mistaken failure.
