Putin and Ukraine

No one who has wantonly murdered tens of thousands of people, including thousands of people in his own army, ever says to himself, “What I’ve done so far is acceptable, but it might be immoral to kill a hundred thousand more people and, even if that’s okay, it surely wouldn’t be right to kill more than a million people.” For that reason, Putin’s thinking seems to be that, even if his army can’t conquer the rest of Ukraine, he can find satisfaction in firing as many missiles as he has handy at every kind of target indefinitely until Ukraine and the West give up. Meanwhile, he can have his propagandists continually piously assert on Russian government-controlled TV, that he is teaching the Ukrainians and the West a lesson, and that the fascists who want to destroy Russia are being obliterated so that the Russian people will be saved from tyranny and return to the glorious days of Peter the Great.