Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking. Ukraine’s punch through Russian defenses in the first foreign invasion since World War II has laid bare Moscow’s apparently illusory red lines.

Washington Post:

On day one of the invasion in February 2022, Putin warned that any country that stood in Russia’s way would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history,” a threat that seemed directed at countries that might arm Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Kursk incursion “proved the Russians are bluffing,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defense official, now an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It shuts down all of the voices of the pseudo experts … the anti-escalation guys.”