“Have the Russians moved?”

“No,” says Denis. “They are staying in the same place, neither moving forward or back.”

“How are they?”

“The villagers say that they are begging for food. They’re so hungry, they come to the villagers and ask for something to eat. The villagers say they are not aggressive. Their commanders want them to fight, to be harsh. But they are too busy asking for scraps to eat.”

So that bit of my reporting was on the money. The other day for New Lines I retold a Reuters story from 2011 that a Russian Army officer was sacked after complaining his boys were fed dog food in tins labeled “prime quality beef.”

The dog food army may not be going backward, but it is not going forward, either. It is more worried about what’s for dinner than besieging Kyiv, and that is not good news for Vladimir Putin.