The difficulty vindicates Putin’s decision to attack now, since Ukraine was becoming more and more dangerous to Russia and an attack might be impossible in a few years even if Ukraine was not yet a NATO member.
That’s what Hitler said during the Battle of Stalingrad. “See how tough this is, we couldn’t have waited another minute!”
Enjoy your Solyanka tonight, by the way.
Of course, he also could have made the far smarter decision not to attack at all.
The well informed Ukrainian I spent a couple hours with yesterday said exactly this. That Putin was threatened by Ukraine become part of NATO and getting nukes, with their western paid and propped corrupt govt. He chose invading now to prevent the nukes no matter what the current cost over the cost of having to do it after the nukes.
Why didn’t the west play chess with this thing and realize of course Putin would attack???? Why are we blaming him when it was our “oligarchs” of the west ignoring this inevitability and playing with fire? It’s like we climbed into a lion’s den and are shocked the lion attacked.