A number of ironies. Putin is trying to invoke memories of the Great Patriotic War by asserting this is about “de-Nazification”. He got it but in reverse. Ukraine is united as a nation as never before, and the brutality of the Russian invaders has alienated even Russian-speaking Ukrainians. To what extent we will probably never know.

Many in the West saw this as a rerun of Afghanistan 2.0: the Russians would roll in to no resistance and the leadership would flee the country. Instead, the Russians got a rerun of Afghanistan 1.0 on steroids.