No, Putin is not crazy or unstable. The establishment wants you to believe that, because then the Ukraine invasion becomes the unpredictable gesticulating of a crazy person and it is nobody’s fault.

The alternative is that this is the well-designed, long-planned act of a person who chose the precisely correct moment to conquer a developed country knowing that the rest of the world would stand around hurtling protestations and name-calling, completely incapable of mounting a meaningful military resistance.

This only ends when Putin does.