Good day. And, as I have consistently said, whenever one seeks to understand a moment as charged, as visually overwhelming, and indeed as historically volatile as the early days of this conflict, one must start not with the explosions on the screen nor with the dramatic images circulating online, but with the logic — the deep structural logic — that underpins events. And if we look at that logic this week, what becomes clear, almost painfully clear, is that the Russian operation has already collided with a set of assumptions that do not correspond to reality.

Let us begin where one must always begin in such matters: with political expectations. It is now evident that Moscow premised its entire offensive — its scale, its tempo, its logistics, its sequencing — on the expectation that the Ukrainian state would effectively fracture within forty-eight hours. This was not simply an optimistic scenario. It was, in fact, the foundation of Russian planning. Everything else, everything we are seeing now, flows from this misalignment.

Because when a military plan assumes that political collapse precedes military engagement — and when that collapse does not materialize — there is no fallback geometry. Everything becomes brittle.

What we see this week, across the northern axis in particular, is that brittleness revealing itself in the most basic and, frankly, the most avoidable ways:

• stalled columns outside Kyiv;
• vehicles abandoned not due to combat, but fuel shortages;
• airborne units dropped into positions that were untenable without rapid ground reinforcement;
• and, perhaps most surprisingly, a striking lack of battlefield initiative within Russian junior command.

And here, as I have said on many previous occasions when discussing conflicts elsewhere, initiative is not a luxury — it is the lifeblood of an offensive. Without it, tempo collapses. And when tempo collapses, the entire edifice of a rapid-entry operation collapses with it.

Ukraine, meanwhile — and this is the point that must be emphasized — has demonstrated not only resilience, but institutional coherence. The government remained in place. The military command structure remained intact. Regional defenses activated rapidly and with coordination. And, crucially, Ukrainian civil society did not fracture. If anything, it consolidated.

This was the outcome Russia most feared and least prepared for. And it is here, in this early week, where one can see the strategic inversion that would define much of the subsequent year: a larger military power discovering, in real time, that its strategic assumptions were built on a mirage.

Now, let us address a point that has generated no small amount of commentary: the Russian logistical picture. Many observers, seeing the miles-long convoys stalled outside Kyiv, have assumed that we are witnessing simple “bad planning.” But that is not quite the right analysis. It is not that Russia lacked logistical templates. It is that those templates were designed for a completely different political scenario.

If you expect a rapid collapse — if you expect to secure key nodes within hours — you stock for tempo, not endurance. You plan for speed, not attrition. And when the tempo breaks, logistics break with it. This is precisely the dynamic unfolding this week.

Ukraine, by contrast, has played to its strengths: urban defense, local knowledge, dispersed maneuvering, and rapid mobilization. These are not the tools of a collapsing state; they are the tools of a state that has learned from 2014 and internalized those lessons deeply.

Let us be clear: nobody expected Ukraine to perform flawlessly in these early days. But what we have witnessed — and what will be studied by analysts for years — is a demonstration of national cohesion under existential pressure. It is a profoundly political fact, and it is reshaping the war before the military lines have even stabilized.

And so, when future historians look back at these early days, they will not, I think, focus on the dramatic videos, nor on the heroic individual actions — as important as those are. They will point to something quieter but more consequential: the moment when Russia’s strategic assumptions diverged decisively from reality, and the moment when Ukraine’s state capacity proved far greater than the invading power had anticipated.

This week marks that divergence. It is the week when the war became something Russia did not plan for — and something Ukraine discovered it could endure.