I've got a group of friends from my time in Budapest who are high-quality journalists (Economist, Reuters, Independent, etc), members of the EU governing body, academics teaching courses on Russia, and others who watch Russia professionally.

Everyone is scrambling now and wondering about Putin's mental health. He may have had a mental breakdown ... this was all the standard Russian power-ploy that he pulls when the EU needs Russian natural gas to stay warm during the winter ... until they bombed Kyiv.

Grabbing the Crimea was all about getting a port that isn't iced over 8 months of the year. So annexing the rest of the southeast was kinda inevitable, and people always expected him to expand deeper into Ukraine.

But when you bomb the capitol city, that has no tactical advantage in his southeastern land grab... well, that is a full on invasion, with the intent of taking over the entire country by force. Not annexing a port.

So when he bombed Kyiv in the first hours of the attack, that CHANGED EVERYTHING. This is actual war.

One of my uber-conservative friends suggested the EU should take Kaliningrad. Immediately. Tit-for-tat.

And that's ... both scary and fucking clever. The EU (or anyone else) can take it by the same logic Putin is using, since it has only been a Russian protectorate (completely encircled by the EU) for 75 years. And it gives the EU a bargaining chip with Russia that has fuckall to do with the USA/Britain/etc.

We are in completely uncharted waters. I don't see any way out of this without an actual shooting war between the US and Russia. It may finally happen. Of course, the Russian military will be utterly wiped out quickly, because they are mostly a pretend army with mostly defective equipment.

Then again, Americans are, first and foremost, racist. And Ukrainians don't really register in our hierarchy of "who is worth saving". So...?

Completely uncharted waters, my friends.