Another Ukraine daily war episode — nearly a week’s worth now — and apparently from all indications the whole horrible affair could be nasty and long-lived until there’s an end or whatever nutcase Vlad Putin deems as an end, and the world titters on the tatters created by the action.
Putin appears a number of bricks shy a full load, and has lost most of his marbles — see how I most successfully embedded two metaphors of going/gone batshit crazy onto one asshole.

Only this fragmented fruit can go nuclear.
Putin may have opened a can of long-term worms with Ukraine — CBS News last night: ‘Given the durability of the Ukrainian resistance and its long history of pushing Russia back, the U.S. and Western powers do not believe that this will be a short war. The U.K. foreign secretary estimated it would be a 10-year war. Lawmakers at the Capitol were told Monday it is likely to last 10, 15 or 20 years — and that ultimately, Russia will lose.‘

Despite shit like this happening seemingly continually since the invasion:

#Ukraine: It seems that the Russian Army lost another BTR-80 variant to the Ukrainian Special Forces. A transport truck was possibly captured at the same time.

Note the RP-377VM C-IED system roughly tied down. pic.twitter.com/GebTPQpBlq

— ?? Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 3, 2022

And the resistance would never cease: ‘“There is not going to be a Vichy Ukraine,” said John Herbst, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, referring to the regime in southern France that collaborated with Nazi Germany. “There may be an effort to create it but the Ukrainians are not going to go gently into the good night. They are going to fight like hell.”‘

However, how could Vlad keeps troops in Ukraine for any length of time — not only does the world oppose his shit, his own country hates it — protests, arrests all over Russia — and besides, Putin’s army sucks. One of the screaming displays this past week is how shitty the Russian army, and how poorly operated, from top to bottom.
Apparently, a goodly chunk of the Russian army is young conscripts who really didn’t know they would be involved in an invasion, but on drill/practice time — not a freaking shooting war. Ha! Gotcha!
Background/details from The New York Times yesterday:

Plagued by poor morale as well as fuel and food shortages, some Russian troops in Ukraine have surrendered en masse or sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.
Some entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting a surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense, the official said. A significant number of the Russian troops are young conscripts who are poorly trained and ill-prepared for the all-out assault.
And in some cases, Russian troops have deliberately punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.

The Pentagon official declined to say how the military made these assessments — presumably a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks may be across the sprawling battlefield.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational developments.
But taken together, these factors may help explain why Russian forces, including an ominous 40-mile convoy of tanks and armored vehicles near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, have come to a near crawl in the past day or two, U.S. officials said.

Maybe just a shitty military overall enterprise:

I like this thread, but with some caveats. During the build up equipment was parked & forward deployed an extraordinary amount of time. I wonder if they got far off maintenance cycles in general by stacking gear for so long in staging areas. https://t.co/FklGlFN0mQ

— Michael Kofman (@KofmanMichael) March 3, 2022

Yet all this shit is off the antics of one man — Vlad Putin. And from all indications, he’s a monster with a blown brain.
Marci Shore, associate professor of modern European intellectual history at Yale University, and author of “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution,” at CNN this morning:

On Thursday February 24, the Russian writer Viktor Shenderovich gave an interview to the Russian news station Echo Moskvy. “This is a war by one person,” Shenderovich said. Then the phone line cut out.

This is Putin’s war, and it is grotesque. I listened to Putin’s majestic Crimea speech eight years ago. And I listened to Putin’s speech last Monday presaging his intention to invade Ukraine.
This is no longer the master chess player, the shrewd grand strategist. He is no longer a rational actor, even in the coldest and most cynical sense. He seemed unwell and unhinged: “We’re ready to show you what real decommunization means for Ukraine. . .”
This no longer felt like a man playing a high-stakes chess game, now it felt like a scene from “Macbeth.”
My intuition was that an aging man facing his own death had decided to destroy the whole world. Ukraine is very possibly fighting for all of us.

An odd look/feel to that, huh?
A clip of the crazy:

Here we are, despite it all, once again…

(Illustration out front: ‘Vladimir Putin,’ oil on canvas, by Tomislav Suhecki, and found here).