THANKS, VLAD!:

By the end of the day of Feb. 24, Ukraine's 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade, part of the National Guard, made a picture of its soldiers rejoicing and demonstrating a bullet-riddled Ukrainian flag at the airfield facilities. 

Russia's "invincible airborne" that landed in Hostomel had been encircled and destroyed.

That was just the beginning of the Battle of Kyiv. The fighting continued for weeks. But Russia's disastrous plan to try to score a rapid victory determined the battle's result -- the complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine's north. 

Six months later, those memories feel like they were from a different war. 

Instead of a splendid blitzkrieg and a rapid triumph over a hopeless Ukraine, the Kremlin slipped into a brutal, prolonged battlefield war it never expected to fight.

The Russian military suffered humiliating defeats, triggered massive Western arms supplies to Ukraine, and wasted months gaining desolated territories in Ukraine's east. 

Over these six months, the war has gone from the expectation that Kyiv will fall within 72 hours to Russia having its strategic airfields in Crimea devastated by Ukrainian attacks. 

Now the 1,000-kilometer front line has largely stabilized. 

Russia, exhausted by unreasonably costly battles in the previous months, finds it increasingly hard to secure any significant gains. Moreover, it struggles to generate high-quality military power to compensate for its losses and step up its effort against Ukraine. 

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