The media war in the Ukraine vs the real war.

Hey Boomers! Remember how quickly the Paris Peace Talks brought a rapid conclusion to the Vietnam War? Or how about our quick wrap-up of the Afghan conflict? Only took 20 short years.

Despite the media's recent narrative heralding the Ukrainian pushback, Himars devastating the Russian invaders, Putin isn't going to leave. He's going to continue the bombing, the punishment and the war on energy prices.

We and the EU will run out of gas (ergo resolve) before Putin does. Then he'll grab the Donbas and extend his hand to kiss and make up.

Russia Unleashes Biggest Barrage of Strikes on Ukraine Since Invasion

Cities throughout Ukraine, including Kyiv, are bombarded after Putin slams Ukraine over Crimea bridge blast

By Ian Lovett Isabel Coles and Mauro Orru, WSJ

Updated Oct. 10, 2022 7:37 am ET

KYIV, Ukraine—Waves of Russian missiles slammed into Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Monday in one of the broadest and most intense barrages of the war, in response to a weekend attack Moscow blamed on Ukraine that seriously damaged a bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had carried out dozens of strikes using missiles as well as Iranian-made drones to target the country’s electrical grid and other civilian infrastructure. “They want panic and chaos,” he said in a video address filmed near his office. “They want to destroy our energy system.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday said Moscow’s response would be “harsh” if Kyiv were to conduct further “terrorist attacks” on Russian territory.

Russia fired at least 75 missiles at Ukrainian cities, of which 41 were intercepted, according to the commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valeriy Zaluzhny. Nine drones were also shot down, said Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, calling for more modern weapons systems to protect Ukraine’s skies.

Strikes hit Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Sumy, as well as the western Ukrainian cities of Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv, which had remained relatively insulated from the war raging in the east and south. Power supply was disrupted in some of those cities.

Mr. Shmyhal said 11 key infrastructure facilities in eight separate regions including Kyiv had been damaged, advising residents to be prepared for temporary outages of electricity, water supply and communications.

Despite the escalation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a call with reporters that no decision had been made to change the status of what Moscow still calls a “special military operation.”

One of the first strikes in Kyiv hit around rush hour Monday morning as people were on their way to work and school. At the scene of an explosion at an intersection near Kyiv’s Shevchenko Park, a body lay in the street near the mangled remains of several vehicles.

At least eight people were killed in the attack on Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district, according to Rostyslav Smirnov, an adviser to the minister of internal affairs. The district is a cultural center, with museums and university buildings around a park where people often stroll or gather to play chess. Another blast hit a glass bridge in the city that is a popular tourist attraction, though it remained intact.

An hour later, a cruise missile slammed into an office tower near a railway line. An electrical station across the street appeared to have been the target.

Outside the office building, a man on a stretcher with a tourniquet on his thigh and blood drenching the lower part of his pant leg screamed as he was loaded into an ambulance. Another man on a stretcher wasn’t moving. One woman stood by, her face covered in blood as another woman picked pieces of glass out of her hair.

A strike also hit near a power station in the eastern part of the city, sending huge plumes of black smoke into the sky.

A spokesman for Samsung Electronics Co. said that an area some 150 meters away from its local headquarters was hit. The impact shattered windows in the building but there were no casualties.

The European Union’s commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders, who was visiting Kyiv, posted a photograph of himself and his team in a basement beneath the hotel where they sought shelter from the blasts.

Authorities in Kyiv initially suspended trains on all subway lines, as underground stations operated as shelters, but service has now resumed.

“The capital is under attack from Russian terrorists!” wrote Mayor Vitali Klitschko, appealing to residents of outlying districts to stay away, while emergency services worked to extinguish fires and security forces closed off streets in the city center.

Air-defense systems have helped keep Kyiv relatively secure in recent months, even as missiles landed in other cities. Many residents who had fled in the early days of the invasion had returned to the city after Russian forces pulled back in March.

The wave of strikes came after a series of military setbacks culminating in an explosion on Saturday that seriously damaged Russia’s Kerch Strait Bridge, which links Russia to Crimea and has been the economic and military lifeblood of the occupying force on the peninsula, was hit by an explosion on Saturday. The explosion struck a symbolic, physical and logistical blow to Russia, exposing a weakness in its readiness to protect important infrastructure and threatening to stifle commercial traffic to Crimea, some Russian analysts said.

Ukrainian officials had expected Russia to respond to the bridge explosion, for which Kyiv hasn’t claimed responsibility. A soldier from Ukraine’s military intelligence said training exercises had been suspended on Monday for the first time in months in anticipation of strikes.

The attack on Ukraine comes as pressure has built on Mr. Putin to turn around a military campaign that has crumbled, revealing tensions within his own vast security apparatus.

Ukrainian forces last month punched through Russian defenses in the north of the country, putting Moscow on the defensive and taking back more than 4,000 square miles of land in the east within weeks, while advancing in the south.

While some of Russia’s right-wing figures have blamed Russia’s Defense Ministry for failures, others have singled out Mr. Putin personally for pursuing the war too timidly. With Russian forces retreating on the ground in Ukraine, some Russia analysts have suggested that a protracted missile campaign could be in the offing, where Moscow will try to bring Kyiv to the negotiating table by systematically destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Russian rockets pounded the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia for the third time in less than a week early Monday, just a day after separate strikes in the city killed at least 14 people and injured more than 70.

Oleksandr Starukh, governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, wrote on Telegram that the latest strikes in the center of the city destroyed a multistory residential building, killing one and wounding five. There could be people under the rubble, he said.

Vladimir Rogov, the Kremlin-installed leader of the partially occupied region of Zaporizhzhia, said the strikes in the city early Monday had targeted “military and civilian infrastructure” used by Ukrainian forces.

Zaporizhzhia, which is about 30 miles from the front lines, has become a constant target of Russian shelling in recent days. Kyiv controls the city but Russian forces hold most of the region’s territory.

Igor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, said strikes had knocked out electricity and water supplies in parts of the city. Traffic on the Kharkiv metro was also suspended. Andriy Sadovyi, mayor of Lviv in western Ukraine, said part of the city was without electricity, with power generators operating to restore water supplies. Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, head of the Sumy regional military administration, said there were power outages in all areas of the region.

“Your attacks provoke only rage and contempt in us! Not fear, not desire to negotiate,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

Though Kyiv didn’t claim responsibility for the attack, senior Ukrainian officials widely celebrated it on social media.

Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin-installed head of Russian-occupied Crimea, welcomed the Russian strikes, writing on Telegram that this marks a change to how Moscow is conducting its “special military operation.”