Russia is cutting off social media, while there's a non-stop stream of video from the Ukrainians, showing Russian armor and supply vehicles stuck in the mud, blown up by Javelins, or simply abandoned roadside after running out of gas.

Every time there's reports of Russian advances, there's a message a couple of hours later saying the situation is under control again. When media are saying that Russian troops are in Kiev, Kharkov, etc. it's often a bunch of units cut off from supply lines, slowly getting ground up by local defenses.

Even more conservative sources such as Britain's MoD are stating that Russian forces are having logistics issues and trouble dealing with dug-in and highly motivated Ukrainian forces.

Even if you cut all the numbers from Ukrainian sources in half, it's clear the price of this invasion is much higher than anticipated by the Russians.

The big question is how long both parties can last, and whether Putin is prepared to escalate further and focus on terrorizing civilians to break morale, etc. If he manages to take out Zelensky somehow, that would probably deal a massive blow to Ukraine.

But Russia is getting booted from Swift and barely has international support, while Germany has done a U-turn on weapons exports and now pretty much all of Europe is sending weapons and supplies to the Ukrainians.

It's obviously too early to tell, but a week ago pretty much everyone thought Ukraine would fall over in case of an invasion, and the current situation seems nowhere near that point. So yeah, I'm a little optimistic (for lack of a better word), even if there's no guarantees whatsoever that things will turn out ok.