Putin will not survive a failed war in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has had a very bad week. His army, allegedly refurbished after its poor performance in the war against Georgia in 2008, has failed to deliver the promised blitzkrieg. It has launched a brutal bombardment of Kharkhiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, full of Russian-speakers who were supposed to welcome Putin’s soldiers as liberators. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s capital Kiev, which Russians like to call ‘the mother of Russian cities’, looks as if it is about to suffer the same fate. The Ukrainians are fighting more fiercely than anyone had expected, perhaps even than they themselves. And they are winning the information war, out-hacking and out-twittering Putin’s people in the most ingenious ways. They may lose the battle if Putin unleashes all his power against them. But they are forging their identity in war, and when it is over no Russian will be able to say, as Putin did, that Ukraine does not exist as a nation.