“The technology is now so advanced that Ukrainian citizens can know, more or less in real time, where the Russian missiles are coming from and generally where they’re going. In this case, Russia had just launched some seventy missiles, headed to sites all over Ukraine. The assumption was that they were directed at power substations, meant to cripple the country’s electrical grid. Vladimir Putin’s recent strategy has been to knock out the power in the depth of winter in hopes of breaking the spirits of everyday Ukrainians.

So far this strategy has not worked.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-profound-defiance-of-daily-life-in-kyiv

Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan within a few years. And Putin will then invade Moldova, then Georgia, then Serbia, and let’s not forget Kazakhstan, with some of the largest oil reserves of the post-Soviet states. 

North Korea, where my family is originally from, and many other countries, will scramble for nuclear weapons.

This is not a regional conflict.

The West promised Ukraine protection for giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s. Europe made a bargain with Putin for cheap energy for nearly two decades. We’ve all played our part in giving rise to a tyrant who makes a Bond villain look second-rate.

And now we’re putting it all on the Ukrainians?

I know the wealthy have a lot to lose, but their children stand to inherit more than their parents’ money. They could end up living in a post-Putin world where everyone from rogue nations to gangsters can threaten to go nuclear. 

Now is the time to be brave.

https://kyivindependent.com/opinion/john-sung-kim-what-elon-musk-and-others-in-silicon-valley-get-wrong-about-ukraine

https://nypost.com/2022/11/18/on-a-visit-to-kherson-i-see-why-the-ukrainians-will-win-with-our-support/

What Putin is also learning, to his cost, is that Ukraine has a loud voice in how this war ends — a war which may end up changing Russia more than Russia has changed Ukraine.

The unfortunate reality is that Putin can’t be stopped without significant costs, but allowing him to normalize the use of weapons of mass destruction would start the inevitable clock to a direct and possibly catastrophic US-Russian conflict. It is a strategy that could require yet further investment of American blood and treasure today in requiring Putin to face consequences designed to prevent a full-scale war and potential nuclear escalation, but costs that are necessary to preserve international peace and security in the long term.

Though the war is far from over and Russia can find new ways to punish Ukraine, collapsing Russian forces have not only been pushed back; in abandoning their former headquarters in Izium, they also left behind large stores of equipment and ammunition that the Ukrainians can now use against them. Even if the Russians stabilize the line in the coming days, they will be in a far worse position than they were on September 1. Building on months of careful efforts to both prepare Ukrainian forces and waste Russian ones, Ukraine has achieved a strategic masterstroke that military scholars will study for decades to come.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/ukraine-russia-putin-kharkiv-kupyansk/671407/

We have such an expression in American English: ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog’. In my opinion Ukraine has the will to fight, they have a reason to fight, they have been bullied by Russia for a long, long time, even back before the starvation in the 30s.

www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/putin-has-already-lost-war-with-ukraine.html