Equity That Can't Be Rescued

It has been now over six and a half months since the start of Russia's attempted seizure of Ukraine, a seizure which Russian president Vladimir Putin schizophrenically described as "a special military operation to remove Nazis." During these past months it has been Russia which has been revealed to be the fascist thug and it has been Ukraine which has been revealed to be the nation of decency occupying the moral high ground.  It has also been revealed that the "mighty" Russian military can be and is in fact being torn to pieces by its intended victims.

It is now being revealed that the seemingly invincible machinery of political conquest which Putin's Russia has built up over the last two decades is unraveling like a badly knitted sweater attacked by a pack of kittens.  That machinery included the sort of dirty tricks which Russia used in 2016 to install Donald Chump in the White House.  (My, how high you all seemed to be riding back then!)  The machinery also included the use of the Russian military as a tool of terror to frighten nations into the Russian orbit.  The motivation for the building of that machinery was the Russian desire to re-establish Russia as the center of empire, an incarnation of the "Third Rome" which would have narcissistically lorded itself over all the other peoples of earth.  

The Russian empire-building exercise has come off the rails in Ukraine.  News reports over the last week have described how the Russian military has lost thousands of square miles of recently conquered Ukrainian territory, and how the Russian military is close to collapse under the weight of fierce Ukrainian counterattacks.  Yet Putin refuses to surrender to reality.  His experiment in empire-building is now a money pit - like a badly built car or termite-eaten house - yet he refuses to come to the point where he chooses to cut his losses and abandon his "investment".  If Putin persists in his war to the point where all his means of coercive force are destroyed, how will he manage to retain his grip on his own population?