As readers know, I admire Russian President Putin, but the reasons I admire him make him a failed war leader.

Putin is a product of an old conception of foreign affairs as a rational enterprise conducted by gentlemen who relied on agreement rather than on the imposition of power. Consequently, when faced with non-gentlemen, Putin finds he played his cards wrong and lacks power.

By this I mean conventional power. He went to war in Donbas without an army, and he still doesn't have one. Therefore, the defense of Russia now resides in tactical nuclear weapons. Once they are used, it goes full scale.

Putin failed to understand that the conflict in Ukraine provoked by Washington had to be quickly won. He has failed to comprehend reality since 2014 when Washington overthrew, while Putin did nothing, the Ukrainian government. He still hasn't built the massive Russian Army that would cause second thoughts among Washington's NATO puppets.

How a leader of Putin's quality fails in this way is beyond my understanding. Perhaps Putin is a Western liberal created by decades of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe propaganda beamed into the Soviet Union. So many Russian intellectuals, known as Atlanticist Integrationists, are a product of Washington propaganda and thus a threat to Russia.

Putin has never enforced any of his red lines. Consequently, every one has been crossed with zero consequences to the West. The latest Western audacity was the American led invasion of Kursk. Putin said the attackers would be held accountable, but the very limited strikes on some Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure hardly count as acts of war.