After three weeks of war, Putin's army has captured only one city, Kherson, off the Black Sea coast; military and civilian resistance has been just too formidable. An increasingly frustrated and angry Putin has resorted to destruction instead: more indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian targets — apartment buildings, schools, over 100 hospitals (most viciously maternity and pediatric hospitals), places of worship, a theater where over 100 refugees had taken shelter, and 10 civilians queuing to purchase the bread of life. Europe has not seen such levels of military brutality since the end of WWII.

The before-and-after video that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared with the U.S. Congress and the world on Wednesday offers poignant juxtapositions of peace and war, life and death, civilization and barbarism. That video along with other images of atrocities circulating around the world have struck a primal, almost universal nerve of indignation. Ukraine and the civilized world cannot unsee the horrendous footage of that unidentified, bloodied, nine-months-pregnant Ukrainian woman ushered in stretchers out of a freshly bombed maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol. Whether in absentia or in person, alive or posthumously, Putin and his generals will eventually be tried for war crimes, and the image of that dying woman will be the prosecution's exhibit No. 1.

Years from now, historians will write countless books about this war, but they will do so with the benefit of hindsight, something that those of us who are chronicling the war as it unfolds lack. We simply don't know whether this will be a short conflict (six months to a year) or whether it will last many more years, as Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole suggested yesterday. I sense that it will end sooner than later.

WHO WILL WIN THE WAR?

Given Russia's military superiority in troop numbers, armament and air power, it is possible that it will win the war in the short term, meaning that it could establish control over vast expanses of Ukrainian territory and install a puppet pro-Russia regime in Kyiv or some other major city. The odds of that happening would be sharply reduced if the United States and NATO were to establish the no-fly zone Zelenskyy has been pleading for over the last two weeks or if Ukraine were to receive the fighter planes it needs. For the time being, NATO and the United States reject such actions. "Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia," Biden said ominously on March 16, "is World War III."

Whatever the case, we are looking at a potential war of attrition. Ukrainian soldiers and civilian combatants are not likely to surrender, and Putin is pursuing, as Col. Alexander Vindman put it, "maximalist goals," which make it hard for him to retreat and end the conflict as if nothing had happened.

LONG-TERM SCENARIOS

Longer term, Russia faces certain defeat, if not in the battlefields, in the home front, where Putin is confronting massive discontent among opposition forces, whose inspirational leader Alexei Navalny has been imprisoned since January 2021.

The thousands of opponents and antiwar protestors are the outer ring of a series of concentric circles surrounding Putin. The next circle consisting of millions of largely apolitical everyday Russians is likely to withdraw its support from Putin as foreign economic sanctions strangulate the economy, sharply cutting the average Russian's standard of living. Next stands the ring of Russian military brass; they are dissatisfied with the course of war as dictated by Putin and insubordination or a coup may be in the cards. Further in is the ring of Russian oligarchs who became obscenely rich when they acquired companies, land, mines and infrastructure that were privatized under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. They struck a deal with Putin: you protect our fortunes, and we will support you. But we have begun to see cracks in that circle, which is likely to unravel given the consequences of prolonged economic sanctions. Closer to Putin is the ring of oligarchs of his own making, loyalists who owe their fortunes directly to him. But even they can turn on the dictator, as did the senators who stabbed Julius Caesar to death on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.

Luis Martinez-Fernandez is the author of "Revolutionary Cuba: A History" and "Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba." Readers can reach him at LMF_Column@yahoo.com. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www. creators.com.

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