Russia dealing with significant casualties

 Red States:

While Kyiv is still under attack and great threat, it’s still standing yet another day, and that’s bad news for Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.

As we noted on Saturday, Putin is reportedly furious. He thought he was going to walk in, Zelensky and the people would flee in panic, and then he’d install a puppet government. While he was right about Joe Biden and the EU being slow to the table on sanctions, the Ukrainian people’s resilience is what has turned the tide against him. Reports are that the Ukrainians have in just four days killed over 4,300 Russian troops. The losses are staggering, if the numbers are accurate.

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Just to put that in perspective, in 20 years in Afghanistan, more than 2,400 Americans were killed.

Putin hadn’t even outfitted his soldiers with sufficient food or fuel to go more than a few days, according to reports. According to some of the soldiers, they didn’t even know they were coming to fight in Ukraine, and others are conscripts being forced to fight. Not the force you need to fight people like the Ukrainians, who are fighting for their country and their lives. Ukraine even managed an attack on a Russian airbase just over the border in Russia.

The losses and being stalled on his objectives already have forced Putin to offer “talks” in Minsk, which would have been in Belarus — basically on his territory, since Belarus has shown they are in his pocket, letting him launch attacks from there. Ukraine has countered with talks at the border, and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said they will be meeting there, “without preconditions.”

“We agreed that the Ukrainian delegation would meet with the Russian delegation without preconditions on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, near the Pripyat River,” Zelensky announced on his official Telegram.

Zelensky admitted he wasn’t thinking much would come out of it but he needed to take every shot at peace he could.
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What the Russians are faced with is the near-universal condemnation from around the world and the EU showing the kind of resolve they rarely do.  The only semi ally Putin has is China, but seeing the results so far, China has to be giving pause to its ambitions against Taiwan.

Putin is also having to deal with internal opposition to his Ukraine gambit as Russian citizens take to the streets in massive protests.