So Trump dropped the "mother of all bombs"—the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal—on Afghanistan, because, surely, the reason ISIS has not ye… - Masha Gessen

Trump has struck more countries with more fire power in a week than Putin often does in a year. Where Putin's unpredictable persona is a carefully cultivated one, Trump has given no evidence that his madman act is an act.

Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail.

Public space frightens the Putin regime, which has worked hard, and effectively, to destroy it.