Putin's current wave of humiliations began on May 9th with the Victory Day parade in Moscow, the only reasonable response to which was "u OK hun???". Normally a day of bombast, bravado, copious military hardware and not mentioning the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, this year was a little different. Putin looked sickly, wizened and preoccupied (whatever with??) while the apparently ailing Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko couldn't even make it to the end of the ceremony. A solitary tank rolled through Red Square, its engine noise drowned out by the sound of thousands of documentary makers around the world rubbing their hands at the montage sequences to come.

"Vladimir Putin believed his army would walk into Kyiv in three days with minimal losses," said the Adam Curtis voice in my head. "But that was a fantasy."