"Putin is the world’s most dangerous fool": in Ukraine he can neither win, nor lose, nor stop — NYT

This is stated in the article "Vladimir Putin Is the World’s Most Dangerous Fool" by the columnist and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize Thomas Friedman in The New York Times.

Analyzing the course of the war in Ukraine, Friedman comes to the conclusion that Vladimir Putin never had a plan B and he really intended to quickly capture Kyiv and install a puppet government there. Now he has put himself in a situation "where he can’t win, can’t lose and can’t stop."

Lacking a back-up strategy, Putin resorted to the tactics of massive shelling of civilian infrastructure and a prolonged war of attrition to establish control over part of the territories which “he can sell to the Russian people as a great victory," the journalist writes.

"Putin’s Plan B is to disguise that Putin’s Plan A has failed. If this military operation had an honest name, it would be called Operation Save My Face. Which makes this one of the sickest, most senseless wars in modern times — a leader destroying another country’s civilian infrastructure until it gives him enough cover to hide the fact that he’s been a towering fool," the article reads.

According to Friedman, the war can end, regardless of whether Russia wins or loses, at the moment when Putin wants it to. He emphasizes that the president apparently fears discontent with the war and for this reason has gone this far in the war that he is ready to criminalize any form of dissent.

Context: The war in Ukraine destroyed Moscow's relations with Western countries, which took a course to isolate Russia and deprive it of its finances for waging war. With the beginning of the invasion, Russia fell under Western sanctions, and Putin himself (along with Maria Lvova-Belova) was issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court in March.

• Another US media, CNN, noted that Putin wanted to show strength, but the parade in Moscow only revealed his isolation.