[NB: UPDATE at 02/28/22 330 PM at End of Post]
When Russian troops entered Ukraine last Thursday, it was hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of doom and gloom. There were, it seemed to me, two possible outcomes, both terrible: Either the Russians would steamroll over the Ukrainian resistance, occupy Kyiv, install a puppet government, throw Zelensky and his associates in jail (or worse), and leave; or, the Ukrainian resistance would be more formidable than expected, and there would be a horrific, bloody carnage that would, inevitably, end in a Russian victory by virtue of their vastly superior force, at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties.
But I hadn't foreseen the third possibility: that the Allies could deploy a weapon powerful enough to force Putin to reconsider the wisdom of what he was doing and bring him to the negotiating table. But that is what seems to be happening.
