Well there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. My personal focus is on the terrible situation in which the people of Ukraine find themselves.

I want to grasp at straws here and, whilst I don't want to sound emptily optimistic, a couple of things I'm hearing, or not hearing, today made me perk up a bit. First, I'm not sure that things have entirely gone Putin's way today. Nothing swift and clean seems to have happened, and Russia is already getting hundreds of its young men back home in body bags. It's clear that there is a big groundswell of opposition in Russia to what's going on (it's being suppressed, obviously). Thousands of Ukraine citizens have been issued with machine guns, and I'm thinking that young Russian conscripts would be reluctant to get shot at from around every corner. In many regards, Russians and Ukrainians are brothers and sisters, not mutual aliens.

Another point well made this evening by BBC correspondents and interviewees is that Ukraine is a country as big as France with a population as big as Spain's, and, while Russian military might could easily overcome the Ukrainian military, it's going to take a hell of a lot more than 150,000 troops to occupy a non-compliant country for any length of time. It seems doubtful that Putin could increase his resources sufficient to achieve that unless he seriously impoverishes his own country.

As I've said before, it could be that the ordinary Russian people may turn out to be the world's best friends...