MAN OF STEELE:

[I]f the desired effect is to cow Ukrainians into submission and make them beg Zelensky to sit down with Putin at the negotiating table, such a scenario seems extremely unlikely. "It's only going to make us angrier," Oleksiy Arestovych, a prominent adviser to the office of the president, told Russian expatriate YouTuber Mark Feygin. Arestovych, who pointed out that power and water were soon restored to most Ukrainian households, insisted that the greatest damage from Monday's attacks (and the far smaller follow-up barrages on Tuesday and Thursday) was to Russia itself: The strikes had "radically" hardened world opinion against the Kremlin, weakening arguments in favor of new peace talks and strengthening arguments in favor of supplying more advanced weapons systems--and air defense systems--to Ukraine. Of course, Arestovych has reasons to stress Russian weakness. But it is a fact that in the wake of the attacks, the delivery of missile defense units to Ukraine from Germany, the Netherlands, France, and the United States is being sped up; meanwhile, on Thursday, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a near-unanimous resolution (99 votes in favor, one abstention) urging member countries to "declare the current Russian regime as a terrorist one." Footage from the air strikes and their aftermath seems almost calculated to create a new wave of sympathy for Ukrainians: When you see civilians in Kyiv singing their national anthem while sheltering in the subway, it evokes iconic images of heroic resistance such as the "Marseillaise" scene from Casablanca.

Seen from this vantage point, the Russian strikes seem less like a show of strength and more like a show of desperation. To be sure, if the Russians could keep up their air terror campaign for weeks, the calculus could change. But this is where a classic Soviet joke comes to mind: A zoo visitor outside an elephant's cage reads an inscription cataloguing the massive amount of vegetables an elephant consumes in a day and asks a passing zookeeper if the elephant can really eat that much food. "Sure he can," says the zookeeper, "but ain't no one gonna let him have it." There's little doubt that Putin would happily bomb Ukraine into rubble if he could; but if nothing else, he doesn't have an unlimited supply of rockets, and whatever drones the Russians can get from the Iranians in a hurry are unlikely to help much.

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