Look man, I SO WANT this to be a bluff, and be happy if this indeed was all just a bluff. But at this point even the Ukrainian population finally accepted the reality and the panic is growing. While they have failed to prepare all that time, including no law enforcement and civil defense plans, and very little military preparations too (because they were just like me - "if you just close your eyes and ears, the bad things will go away").

We in Poland have been now evacuating people by helicopter already, and I can't even imagine the scenes when millions would go to their cars and try to get to Poland at the same time. Which is what they actually say they will do, once airports are closed. They don't even to have to be bombed while stranded for such exodus to be mayhem, and they probably will be bombed because that's how the Russians do it. In Georgia they didn't attack refugees, and the retreating soldiers mixed with them, on a huge scale from the air only because Russia's own ground forces were constantly targeting their own planes, no coordination which they surely fixed this now. In Chechnya they weren't firing on their own aircraft so the pilots were free to attack thousands of people on the roads as they please (very little meaningful air defense from the opposition), including with FAE bombs on parachutes. It's fucking terrifying and it's not funny.

I so wish he would say "no", and at last send home his hungry soldiers languishing in empty train stations and often-frozen forests, and also told the People's Republics to stop their bullshit (which includes wholesale evacuation, to Arctic Siberia no less, and general mobilization of fighting age males). This is not happening.

Oh, and he ready did invade Ukraine. Even massacring Western civilians in the process (MH17).

It begins on 22 February at 4 am, Zhirinovsky had promised most publicly long ago.