In a year or two, the question won’t be whether Ukraine can survive, it will be whether the Russian Federation can survive. Some 140 million people over 11 time zones may not hold together and remain loyal to a Moscow that squanders vast wealth and blood on a pointless project. And trying to persuade 44 million Europeans who are accustomed to freedom to accept recolonization by a pea-brained 19th-century despotism is a pointless project.

Mr. Putin got himself into this mess. He volunteered for it, under compulsion from nothing except the wildly misinformed inner voice that told him invading Ukraine was a good idea. From underlings whose chief motive perhaps was to get out of the room without a scene, he heard that billions gifted to the military were spent efficiently and without graft. He heard that the sanctions-proofing he ordered up went swimmingly, with industries and elites compliantly relinquishing the benefits of overseas inputs, expertise and finance. He was fed a stream of foreign press reports testifying to his presidential genius, his mastery of cyberwarfare, his use of Twitter and Facebook to control the minds of his adversaries. The latest reporting says he even kept his government in the dark about his Ukraine plans so his pristine overconfidence could remain undisturbed.

Consider Russia’s GDP. The country is closer to 10 inches tall than 10 feet tall, a fact known to Western leaders, whatever their mistakes. Flipping through the playing-card deck of the Putin coterie, a few still boast reputations for ability and spine, like Rosneft chief Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Gen. Sergei Shoigu and central banker Elvira Nabiullina. These people might be smart to do something about Mr. Putin before he does something about them, given that his choice of scapegoats is likely to begin with those whose competence he finds most threatening.