The images and suffering in Ukraine are devastating, beyond words or comprehension in the year 2022. We often seem to me to be unfit to live on this earth.

But amidst all of the reporting, punditry, and media score-keeping, it is healthy and vital – essential perhaps – to understand what very few pundits are saying.

Vladimir Putin has reawakened a love of democracy and an appreciation of freedom worldwide, including in the United States.

Amidst this dreadful tragedy are much reason for hope and some comfort.

Putin has suffered a devastating loss, no matter how many war crimes he can order.

He can slaughter thousands of Ukrainians indiscriminately, destroy homes and buildings and sacrifice thousands of his ill-prepared soldiers.

Still, there is no disguising the lethal damage he has done himself, his mad cause, the Russian state, the Russian economy, the Russian people, and his legacy.

Putin has overnight reawakened the Western European and American passion for democracy. We are, for the first time in modern times, united. If the United States is weaker, Europe is more substantial, and together, we are all strong enough.

In one sense, that makes all of us safer.

Putin was wrong about everything. He was wrong about the resistance of the Ukrainian People. He was wrong about the tactics of his Army. He was wrong about the strength of NATO.

His Army is already too long bogged down in much the same way the German Army that invaded Russia during World War II was overwhelmed. They controlled the air, killed millions of people, and had miles of tanks, armored cars, and well-armed soldiers.

The media keeps forgetting that human hearts can be the most powerful weapons on earth.

The Germans were nibbled to death by enraged and patriotic Russians.

This story is as sad as it is ironic. After he failed in Russia, Napoleon said that if you invade a country that doesn’t want you there, you better win right away, or the worst is yet to come.

While his 40-mile convoys of trucks and tanks bog down in the mud and are getting picked off one at a time, the Ukrainian Army and people are re-grouping into small and lethal units.

They are well equipped for a protracted guerilla war in the vast forests of Ukraine; the Russian Army is not.

Biden is right. Putin will pay, and so will the people he claims to lead.

He has just perpetrated one of the most dangerous and consequential blunders in the tragic and blood-drenched history of war. There will be a reckoning that will last for decades.

But much good is already coming from it, despite the awful toll on innocent people.

As of today, (American Express, Visa, and Mastercard, cut off access to their credit cards anyone in Russia) Russ is now the most isolated nation on earth. Putin shut down Facebook in Russia and banned all independent media. He threatened everyone who criticizes him with 15 years in jail.

He will force his country to look elsewhere for the truth. The whole world looked deep into his soul and been repulsed.

And the truth will get there; the Russian hackers are among the best in the world, as are the Ukrainians. They are already talking to one another, according to the geek underground.

There is no way a country can become or remain a superstar when they are cut off, shunned, and isolated in this way.

Very little in this ego war has gone Putin’s way, and it will only get worse, bit by bit.

Just about every western country is scrambling to send anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles into the country. We have begun seeing the results recently:  videos of Russian aircraft shot out of the air, and Russian tanks and trucks were blown up where they sit.

More devastating economic sanctions will be announced tomorrow.

Russian soldiers are said by the Pentagon to be surrendering by the hundreds rather than sit in stalled convoys waiting to be set on fire by grandmothers with Molotov cocktails.

Every respectable and authoritative report says the morale of the Russian Army has virtually collapsed while the confidence and purpose – and fury –  of millions of Ukrainians have soared.

You don’t win over a civilian population by bombing and killing women and children and civilian men.

The more they suffer, the more they hate, and the more they hate, the more they sacrifice and kill.

You make more and more enemies by the day this way. The Germans created the idea of “blitzkrieg” to invade and occupy in a few days before resistance could build. The only history Putin seems to know is 700 years old. He wants to be an emperor.

You will be seeing those videos of burning Russian tanks and planes for years.

Putin has strengthened the unity and commitment of the NATO alliance after Donald Trump tried to weaken it for four years. He has gravely damaged his fanboy Trump, who stupidly (as is his way) praised Putin’s brilliance and savvied as the attacks began rather than wait a few hours to think about it.

Putin is far more vicious than Donald Trump, who is mostly doing his idea of political theater.  He is a coward who hides behind the mask of toughness.

Putin is also a lot smarter, as Trump’s inane and bumbling comments all week remind us again. No sane politicians would walk into traps like that so joyously.

And what makes Putin so dangerous is that, unlike Trump, he believes what he says.

Even many of Trump’s Republican footstools choked and gagged every time he opened his mouth.

Trump has never looked as dumb and foolish as he does now. During turbulent times, this is the last person on earth rational people will want in the White House.

He will never get back there.

Someday, some sharp director will make move about the so-called friendship between these two fatally flawed men.

I was in therapy too long to hate either of them, I know what mental illness can do to a human. But Putin is genuinely hateful in a cold and reptilian way. I met a thousand Trumps when I was a reporter, most of them selling miracle cures and pots that never burn.

He’s just better at it than most con men.

Our media is excellent at covering wars and explosions and political in-fighting; their weakness is perspective.

They don’t have any.

Just as they can’t admit that Trump, their Golden Calf, is over, they can’t see or tell us what is so obvious: that Putin has shot himself in the foot and stabbed his country in the heart, as well as committed genocide on an innocent civilian population.

This war was lost on the third or fourth day.

It’s not about who captures a city or kills the most people, it’s about democracy versus the bloodiest kind of totalitarianism, and the whole world knows it. Every waking human being on the earth has to make a choice: be free or not.

And billions of people who weren’t thinking about freedom are thinking about it now.

Putin has the world’s full attention, which is a very rare thing. And the Ukrainians know it. Their greatest fear is that we will stop paying attention and worry more about oil prices than human decency.

President Zelensky surely knows it.

He had beaten Putin’s brains out on one of the most important battlegrounds on earth: social media andTik Tok.

Women all over the world are swooning over his videos on Tik Tok and elsewhere, he is swamped with marriage offers. Zelensky is a hero all over the planet.

While Putin holds up in his palace like a trapped reptile (can you imagine this cold creature putting up a video on Tik Tok?), Zelensky has brilliantly triumphed in the court of public opinion, something that is essential to the survival of his country.

He has made democracy popular again, just as we began to wonder.

He will not be forgiven for any of those things.

Kremlin scholars say he will have to go in six months, one year, or two years. But he has doomed himself. Russia cannot prosper or survive in the whirlwind he has spawned.

We can argue all we want about war, but no sane person can say that anything Putin has done has been innovative, let alone brilliant. Biden has had his struggles, but so far, he looks like he knows what he is doing.

Putin’s Army may yet overwhelm the Ukrainians and capture or kill their unlikely Churchillian President – the pundits all say that will happen, but they have little credibility with me, they are so often wrong.

I’m no psychic, but I’m doubtful after this week.

What Putin seems to be doing is setting in motion is a protracted guerilla war without end, one he cannot win with tanks and artillery shells. If you’ve been paying attention this last 15 or 20 years, you probably can figure out how this story is likely to end.

There are 45 million Ukrainians, and most are eager and willing to fight.

This is now a guerilla war, the kind Russia, the United States, Britain, and many other countries have lost throughout centuries, with devastating and heartbreaking consequences.

We are good at killing, but not at conquering hearts and minds.

Biden and his allies are demonstrating the weaponizing of the global economy, Russia is in a meltdown.

Putin is in a trap of his own making.

We have again and again learned the lesson Putin is just now learning. His very name is drowning in blood and cruelty and is now synonymous with murder and insanity.

This war has just begun, and Putin can destroy as many cities as he wants. He will be living with this war and its consequences for the rest of his cold and isolated life.

And I doubt it will be a long one.

The best Russian scholars say he is now doomed to be pushed or thrown aside. His plan failed miserably and the suffering and slaughter is pointless and needless.

The Ukrainians did not welcome his soldiers as liberators, as he promised. They are far better fighters than he expected. The Ukrainians are paying for this with their blood.

After generations of suffering, the Russian people were beginning to enjoy low mortgage rates, plenty of goods, lots of inexpensive food, some measure of freedom,  and economic security.

Putin took all of these things away from them for no other reason than his ego ran away with his judgment, sanity, and any shred of humanity he might once have possessed.

The Russian economy is in shambles.

Biden is looking effective for the first time in more than a year; the Western nations are more united than at any point in my lifetime. Fox News has never looked weaker or more cowardly and opportunistic.

Marjorie Taylor-Greene has never looked more juvenile, insensitive,  or pathetic than she did while yelling at the President as he talked about the death of a son.

Even as Tucker Carlson was spewing his racist hatred and slobbering over Putin, Fox News reporters were risking their lives, to tell the truth about what was happening in Ukraine.

They did a great job, even as the commentators, retired generals, and pundits stabbed them in the back, sitting on their asses in their TV studios and knowingly lying.

This invasion is an earthquake, inside and out of Ukraine itself. It is changing the world. China is reported carefully watching to see what might happen if they invade Taiwan.

They aren’t happy.

Even famously neutral Switzerland has turned on Russia, and even Germany is shipping powerful weapons to another country for the first time since World War II.

Putin, ignorant it seems, of the realities of modern times and modern warfare, still believes he can shut the truth of the world and the consequences of his madness out of his country. Another grotesque miscalculation.

He can’t kill every one of the people who dread or challenge him, nor can he put his entire nation in jail. Stalin tried that, it didn’t work for him either.

Say what you want about social media and the Internet, but information wants to be free and can no longer be blocked entirely. The Russian mothers know the truth; their sons come home in plywood boxes.

Ukraine’s tragedy is turning out to be a sad but profound victory for democracy and freedom.

People want to be free. And they will fight for it.

There are too many victims to count, but there is one big and powerful loser in this horror, no matter what happens. It is Vladimir Putin.

The Ukrainian suffering is unbearably sad to see.

But I take strength and hope from that. There is nothing in this hellish brutality to be happy about.

But this monster will not win this battle.