Fog of War.

Putin says he considers Russia and Ukraine to be one country. 

No shock and awe. Yet.

No analogy or extended metaphor is perfect, but something needs explaining. 

Russia is invading Ukraine, but not crushing it, at least as of this morning.  As Putin describes it to the Russian public, this is more an intervention than invasion. After all, Ukraine is part of the Russian family. Ukraine was seduced into the clutches of a malevolent cult, in this case the West, and this is a rescue mission. As of now, we are not seeing massive aerial bombardment that would terrorize Ukraine and destroy its seat of government. Russia has the capacity to do it. Russia had been restrained, measured against what it could do. We were not seeing shock and awe.

That may be changing. We are hearing word of the intentional destruction of Ukraine hospitals and kindergartens. It may be true. Or not. We don't know. The Russian public heard that Ukraine crucified a three year old boy because he spoke Russian. I am skeptical of everything.

Putin outlined his understanding of the greater Russian land and people back in 2005, and he reiterated it in a speech just prior to the invasion. 

Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.

Historically Ukraine is the cradle of Moscow-centered Russian civilization. In Putin's view, Ukraine was kidnapped by a suitor whose real intent was damage to Russia. The West, he said, wanted to deprive Russia of its natural borders, and forever burden it with ethnic and cultural incoherence. Putin wrote:

The Ukrainian authorities — I would like to emphasize this — began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us. . .. Ukraine itself was placed under external control ... a colony with a puppet regime.

He said the West engineered the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-leaning Ukraine president, who was replaced by European-oriented leaders. Ukraine's government is illegitimate, he tells the Russian people.

Is Putin's description objectively accurate?

Ukraine is a borderland. It is accurate and inaccurate. Some Ukrainians consider their country a sibling with Russia; others a second-cousin forced into a bad marriage. Ukraine's rural peasantry endured genocidal starvation by Stalin's policies.  Obscured by the grotesque inhumanity of Hitler's holocaust was the prior genocide carried out by Stalin. Stalin killed three million Ukrainians for the benefit of Russians elsewhere. Ukrainian farmers' food was confiscated and sold abroad to get the foreign exchange needed to build factories. He literally, intentionally, starved Ukrainians to death. Stalin and Communist Party officials justified it as the cost of creating an urban proletariate necessary to sustain a Communist revolution. A decade later Ukraine citizens fought and died in huge numbers to protect the Soviet Union from Nazi Germany. The history is complicated.

There are 200,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, but we are apparently seeing Ukraine citizen deaths in the many-hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands. Look at this bit of Twitter video. Unarmed Ukrainians mob a vehicle with Russian soldiers. Notice what the armed soldiers did when under attack. They sped away. No one was shot or run over. 

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Americans don't know what is true and untrue in Ukraine. That includes this video. What will be unmistakable will be shock and awe against Ukraine, if it comes.