Is this Putin’s ‘off ramp’ out of Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin will soon have to select the version of defeat that suits him best. His plan A – a lightning quick invasion, followed by installing a government in Kiev, then horse trading with the effete and corrupt West – has failed entirely. To that extent, he has already lost.

For now, Putin has applied plan B. It consists of tactics used elsewhere, such as in Grozny and Aleppo, which allows him to indulge his penchant for blind slaughter while waiting for someone to blink. Aside from one man’s vainglory, there is a hellish calculus at work here: how long can Ukraine resist the invaders; how long can the Russian army sustain this miserable enterprise, both morally and in terms of supply; and how long will Putin’s subjects at home put up with a rapid attrition of living standards?

Nobody can call the outcome of this spread bet, but for all his bluster and rage, Putin isn’t looking or sounding like a winner worth backing today. 

Those Kremlin meeting tables – many yards long – at the far end of which sit those he must assume to be his closest allies, yet whom he treats as potential assassins: it’s not a convincing look.