@DamonLinker I see my style of understatement can be misleading.
I'm not actually all that puzzled. Putin is making the same mistake great powers trying to get a handle on a war they're losing have been making since at least the 1950s, bomb their way to victory.

@DamonLinker The problem is that it never works, and is well understood by experts not to work - the baffling thing is that political leaders continue to treat it like it works.
The level of policy deflection that 'inflict misery with bombs' has been able to achieve is minuscule.

@DamonLinker A charitable reading is that it got N. Vietnam to delay the conquest of the South by a bit more than two years and it got Milošević eventually to give up on Kosovo but not before attempting to accelerate the ethnic cleansing.
Most of the rest of the time it just fails.

@DamonLinker But it is in a way just incredible that a strategy which has shown repeatedly that the best it can do is prompt fairly small changes in non-vital state interest continues to be pulled out as a war-winner to get states to abandon perceived vital interests in major ways.