“From my vantage point in a hotel room in the center of Kyiv,” he writes, “the whole attack was no big deal - just a matter of losing a little sleep and hearing some loud thumps,” as air defenses provided by Washington did their work.

With the front “only about 360 miles away,” Kyiv is a “bustling, vibrant metropolis with traffic jams and crowded bars and restaurants.” Better yet, most of the residents who fled that city when the Russians invaded in February 2022 have since returned home.Īnd despite what you might read elsewhere, incoming Russian missiles are little more than annoyances, as Boot testifies from personal experience. Something akin to normalcy prevails and the mood is remarkably upbeat. In a recent column reported from the Ukrainian capital - headline: “I was just in Kyiv under fire” - Boot writes that actual signs of war there are few. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring counteroffensive. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. ( ) – Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action.

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