Let me say the thing that Ukrainian caution sometimes will not say out loud. You have already won the argument that history will record. Russia has lost this war. Not “will lose,” but “has lost.” The verdict is written. What remains is the sentencing, and the date. Watch the man at the center of it and you can see the defeat all over him. On June 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked into St. George Hall at the Kremlin to address the graduating officers of the Defense Ministry, the Federal Security Service, the Federal Guard Service, and the National Guard. More than six hundred young men he raised to guard his throne. He spoke of NATO at the gates, of a West inventing the threat it claims to fear, of a modernized nuclear triad and a thousand weapons proven in combat. The whole liturgy of a confident empire.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. And he delivered it from across the room – fully 50 meters back from the very men sworn to protect him. A Tsar who will not stand within arm’s reach of his own honor guard is not projecting strength. He is rehearsing his own funeral and hoping no one in the hall is taking notes. They are taking notes. Strip away the staging, the talk of sovereign strength, and the 800 years of borrowed Russian glory the hall was built to summon. What is left standing 50 meters from his own officers is the Emperor with No Clothes. Tsar Eunuch the First, and the Last. A man castrated not by Kyiv and not by NATO, but by his own buffoonery. The empire did not fall to a foreign blade. It was unmanned by the fool wearing the crown.