A third of the forces they’d amassed around Ukraine over the past few months so have plenty of reserves to increase the pressure.

They’ve been preparing for this for years, very intensely over the past few months. A comment I heard about the hyped up need for personal sanctions against Putin - Putin knew that would be a personal cost going in, so will not be deterred by them. He will be punished by them. I think that’s largely true across the board with sanctions.

So, hard to know how long they can maintain a sustained military push, but it probably isn’t more than a few weeks. They’re gambling with the resilience of domestic Russian sentiment as the country’s economic pain and isolation grow. And then what? A puppet regime? An occupation would last indefinitely, so if this guy thinks they wouldn’t make it more than 10 days, imagine what he’d say about that. If scaring Ukraine into submission is really the idea, looks like another serious miscalculation by ol’ Vlad.

Maybe he’s not so savvy after all. Hoping for the best, but man what a tragedy this is for Ukraine. I can’t imagine how this would feel, and hope never to be able to.