More importantly, clicking through, he called it "Russia's 'senseless war'." That a much more targeted statement. He says it is senseless for Russia to be waging this war.

It is remarkable how thoroughly ignorant of Russian deep culture the west is. By their "deep culture", I mean the subconscious fears shared by the vast majority of the Russian population. Russia has been invaded many times. Several of those invasions have come from the west. Russians are extremely suspicious when it comes to military activity near their western borders. They have the history to justify those suspicions. When the Davos set tells Russians "Oh, but it's all Kumbaya now. All these countries on your western border with lots of military drills are just fulfilling their democratic promise", the Russians don't accept that at face value. You can call them paranoid if you like, but again, their history of invasion informs their culture in a way it is difficult - most especially for Americans - to comprehend.

Ukraine is too close. The Russians have said so for thirty years. The western press is treating the Russian invasion as a sudden event, but the Russians quite explicitly and publicly said for decades that they would not tolerate hostile military activity in Ukraine, and that they would go to war over this. Post 2014, the Ukrainian government (with recordings of Victoria Nuland having a large hand in midwifing its leadership) began overt military operations against the culturally Russian populations living in the Donbass. That sure sounds like hostile military activity on Russia's border. They reacted exactly how they had said they would for three decades.

The western press plays this as "Putin wants to take over Eastern Europe again." In other words, they flatly ignore what Russia has consistently said since the fall of the Soviet Union. In the western mind, this is "Russian aggression", but that has nothing to do with how Russians perceive this. The activity is literally on Russia's border. Is it on England's border? No. Is it on France's border? No.

Western leaders absolutely loathe the Russian security state. Because of that visceral hatred, western leadership maintains a completely closed mind to alternative explanations for Russian behavior other than "Putin is Hitler II." Then these same western leaders are shocked when their plans are working out not at all as they expected. They are incapable of realizing that it is precisely their own premises which are thoroughly narrow-minded and not accounting for the reality of what is happening. Reality is winning, and the west is economically getting its ass kicked because it refuses to open its understanding to a more complex world than "Hitler II".

The situation will not change until Davos allows it to, until the Ukrainian state completely collapses, or until there is nuclear war between Russia and the west. The west has only themselves to blame. Whether we like the Russians or agree with them or not is actually beside the point. The point is they will not let this one go. For Russia, this IS existential. The west is playing empire. The Russians are quite sure they are literally fighting for their existence. Putting a nuclear power into an existential fear for their survival, you are not going to get a "tactical victory". Either you acknowledge the importance of security on their western border to the Russians or they will keep fighting. That's the reality of the Russian bear. Russians have done this before, many times in the past few centuries. But just as Davos was confident they would be the ones to pacify Afghanistan, so they are confident they will be the ones to bring Russia to its knees.

We the civilians living in the west are now feeling the pain just as the civilians in Russia and of course at another level the civilians in Ukraine are. I fully agree this war is completely senseless. But it has a TON more sense for the Russians (preventing yet another invasion from the west) than it has for any of us living in the west.