Hey.

Our sorrows are constant but our joys are brief.  Time is a brutal but a careless thief - he takes our love but leaves behind our grief.  Mutter.

oh yes...

Oh crap - I type things but invisible claws withdraw them.  Why do they bother?

Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled,
Down through the long loneliness of the world.
Until we behold the pain become the pearl, the pearl ...

Putin's record so far:

Annexed Abkhazia and S Ossetia and has had to subsidize the regions to the tune of $20,000-plus per citizen year. Not that the citizens see any of that, as the subsidies disappear into the hands of local officials, hence the need for perpetual and greater subsidy.

Annexed Crimea, over which Russia already had harbour rights guaranteed by international treaty. Crimea has no fresh water or electricity-generation of its own and relies on deliveries of coal and piped water from Ukraine. The region has become an even deeper money pit for Russia, with conditions on the ground desperate.

Has invaded SE Ukraine and is facing anger from the families of all the Russian troops whose deaths there are not acknowledged. Has destroyed the infrastructure of the Donbas and turned it into a bottomless money pit for the future.

The customers for his gas are cheerfully seeking new supplies amid the world energy glut and he has invested precisely nothing in diversifying Russia's economy to prepare for this. His currency's trash, his crony corporations have lost access to the capital and western expertise they need to keep the gas and oil flowing. He's been reduced to signing a deal with China to sell gas at cost, but even then only if he can find $50 billion he no longer has to build the infrastructure.

Putin is an ignorant, blundering dupe who in a civilized country would never have risen above his former job of collecting cuttings from western newspapers as a clerk in the KGB.

Put him in an elevator with Obama and he'd step into the shaft.

It's reached the stage where you might as well hand Donetsk over to the silly little old man in Moscow and let him deal with the gangs he's armed to the teeth.

Very unfortunate for the Ukrainians still stuck there, but even worse for the Russians left to deal with it. It'd be like trying to govern London after you'd distributed tanks and artillery to the Krays and the Richardsons.