Commentary On the morning of Feb. 24, central European time, Russian military forces attacked Ukraine across four separate axes—from the north, east, and south. For the first time in 75 years, air raid sirens once again blared across one of Europe’s ancient capitals. The expectation among Western military analysts, and most certainly within the Kremlin, was that Ukrainian military forces would quickly collapse, the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy would abandon Kyiv and flee for safety, and Russia would take advantage of the resulting power vacuum to announce a new “unity government,” no doubt already prepared and in waiting, that would immediately plead for a ceasefire with Russia. The Kremlin gambled that the Russo-Ukrainian war would be over in a few days, the United States and its NATO allies would impose toothless sanctions, and the rest of the world would quickly return to normal. This sequence of events might still happen, …