A quiet Sunday morning. General Mud to the defense. A question of time.

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The Russians consider their most effective defenders to be General January and General February. Napoleon and Hitler could neither one survive the Russian winter.

Ukrainians need to credit General Mud. That awesome 40 mile long convoy headed toward Kyiv from the Northwest has not moved for a week. A similar one coming down from the Northeast is making very slow progress. My guess is that it is the same story. The road is not that wide – maybe 30 feet. Narrower where bridges have been blown. They cannot operate in the mud alongside the roads. The roads have almost certainly been mined, blown up, blocked by rubble and so on.

The surprise has been that Ukraine has not attacked these convoys. Let me repeat my wild surmise from five days ago. They may not need to.

Thousands of troops are stuck and cannot move. They need to eat. They need water. Just keeping them battle ready is going to be tough. Meanwhile, they cannot help but interact with the local people. They do not shoot every civilian they see.

The local people speak their language. The Russian soldiers will certainly hear how unpopular they are. If the Ukrainian psychological operations people are on the ball, as I expect they are, they will be using loudspeakers, leaflets, radio and other means to ask the Russians to give up.

In the United States' recent wars soldiers have been able to denigrate the local people as gooks, ragheads, camel jockeys and the like. The Russians cannot do that to people who look just like them and speak their language. Ukrainians will be harder to dehumanize.

My dear wife assures me that the Russians have been thoroughly propagandized to the effect that the Ukrainians are subhuman. There is a strong thread of this in Russian history. Putin has great control over the media in Russia, and it has been spewing hate about Ukraine for quite a while now. Putin himself calls us "Little Russia" and says that Ukrainian is no more than a dialect of Russian. On the other hand, Russians are well aware that their governments have always lied to them, more blatantly even than modern Western governments. Some let the propaganda simply wash over them.

I can testify about the language. Speaking Spanish I had no trouble learning Portuguese. Speaking Russian I am finding it damned difficult to learn Ukrainian. They are not the same. In fact, apart from the alphabets Ukrainian seems to be closer to Polish. Ukrainians have reciprocally disliked the Russians for the three centuries they have been under Russian domination.

Out of the other side of their mouth, the Russians call us a “brother nation.” There are monuments to “Friendship between nations” all over Kyiv. The two countries have had extensive cultural and commercial exchanges. A great many Russians know Ukraine, and the other way around. Oksana and I have talked with Russian tourists in Crimea and Andorra. They were happy to find fellow Russian speakers. Many of the great "Russian" authors such as Gogol and Bulgakov were Ukrainians writing in the Russian language.

It could well be that Ukraine has the wherewithal to annihilate these bogged down columns. Or at least threaten to. I am not sure that Russia could assess how real the threat was. They have been spectacularly wrong so far. These columns could be a bargaining chip. Ukraine will not destroy them if they agree to go back to Russia and leave us alone.

Putin can not afford a long drawn out war. The ruble cost of prosecuting it is equivalent to several tens of billions of dollars per day. As Edward Slavsquat noted in yesterday's column, the Russians and Ukrainians both need to get on with spring planting or else there will be a widespread famine. Ukraine, with more fertile soil and the ability to at least import seeds from the west, will probably survive better than Russia. It is the rest of Europe and Middle Eastern countries that will suffer the most if the cost of food skyrockets. Ukraine has several times restricted exports to ensure that its own people can afford food.

That's my armchair analysis. Time is on Ukraine's side more than Russia.

Graham