Warren Buffett once said about the efficient market hypothesis, "we have benefitted greatly from a school of thought that told us not to think."

You've applied this logic to Putin and geopolitics. Like all autocrats, the little man in elevator shoes is a Ponzi-scheming improviser whose only strategy is to double down on what worked before and doesn't anymore because the world finally woke up to the game's logic.

Betting on Putin and Lavrov the Liar instead of Uberfrau Ursula and Biden is a bad bet. Betting on a shrinking economy of $1.5tn that's

* Relying on North Korea and Iran for shells and drones

* Pulling T34s and T55s out of storage

* Has a tank mfg capacity of 20/month

instead of a coalition of 51 countries with 2/3 of the world's GDP is also a bad bet.

Putin just said Russia lacks modern weapons.

Bloomberg just published an article with interviews of multiple Russian oligarchs who initally supported the war and are now fatalistic and resigned to, at best, a frozen conflict in which Ukraine takes back most of its territory.

For regime preservation Putin needs to lose to NATO, not Ukraine. But NATO won't give him that chance.