Ukraine isn’t mountainous terrain that’s hard to navigate both on foot and with even modern aircraft. It isn’t a subsistence economy that has been at war for a thousand years. It isn’t home to people who made a life raiding into India for women and livestock, fierce mountain vikings, even before becoming the graveyard of empire as they cut their teeth on three world powers in a row, getting stronger with each they drove out, generation by generation. These are farmers and programmers and project managers, who are dying in trenches on a flat field as surely as the Flemmish before Germans in WWI, and yes, the line can hold forever, but it takes X lives every day to make that happen, and there’s no endgame where Russia gives in, because it needs the fresh water from the non-Crimea shit to hold Crimea, which has no rivers, and their whole Black Sea naval operation is out of there, and they’re not going to cede the whole Black Sea.

What absolutely bizarre hagiography.