NATO troops in Ukraine? The horror!

Really, Putin's spokesman has a future on Saturday Night Live. Talking to ABC yesterday, Dmitry Peskov "rejected the idea of deploying European peacekeepers in Ukraine," explaining with a straight face that "We cannot allow NATO's military infrastructure to get that close to our borders."

Really? In 2022, when Putin first began to encroach on Ukraine's territory, the only NATO countries on Russia's borders were Estonia and Latvia, with a tiny bit of Norway in the far north. Add the colony of Kalingrad, a German exclave that Stalin grabbed in 1945, and Lithuania and Poland are also neighbors. And now? Russia's invasion of Ukraine prompted Finland to join NATO, more than doubling Russia's border with the military alliance. And the Finns are tough: when Stalin invaded Finland in the Winter War of 1939-1940, the Red Army was humiliated, much as it was when it tried to reach Kyiv in February 2022.