Nine words: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”

For the record, I have no problem with President Biden's ad-libbed comment about Putin yesterday. Blunt talk about autocrats is sometimes welcome, and wartime seems like an especially auspicious occasion for it. What's more, I very much doubt that it will cause Putin to blow his top or anything like that. Quite the opposite: the fact that Biden is obviously very sincere in his loathing of Putin makes it clear that the US and NATO are unlikely to back down in Ukraine. This in turn should motivate the Russian leadership to look for ways to retreat from an obvious quagmire.