Putin is showing himself to be even more of a madman than we thought.

In his first extended remarks since he started the war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin today said that Ukraine “risks losing its statehood” if its leadership “continues to do what they are doing.” Given the fact that what the Ukrainians are doing is defending their nation from an all-out criminal attack on the populations of their cities, this is neon-lettered madness in all-caps. In justifying the war before he ordered the attack, Putin claimed “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” which raises the question of what Putin meant by threatening to take away the statehood of a state that never was a state. Does he mean killing so many Ukrainians there aren’t enough living, breathing human beings to inhabit what’s left of Ukraine when he’s finished? Who knows what he means, because if we’ve learned one thing over the past weeks and months, it is not to expect anything even approaching logic to come out of his mouth.

Putin then went on to proclaim that sanctions against Russia “are akin to a declaration of war.”

This motherfucker who has sent over 150,000 Russian soldiers onto Ukrainian soil and ordered them to send bombs and artillery shells and rockets into cities killing women and children and the elderly and young alike is telling us that stopping Russians from shopping at Gucci in Rome and Dior in Paris and seizing his buddy’s mega-yachts is a declaration of war.

And while I’m ranting, the phrase you’re seeing every 30 seconds on your television screens, “bombing Ukraine’s cities into submission,” is just a gentle way of saying that the Russian army, under Putin’s orders, is committing wholesale murder of entire populations of civilians. What the Russian army is doing by firing cluster munitions and thermobaric missiles at civilian areas of Ukrainian cities is nothing less than slaughter, and the networks should start stating that plainly.

This war is going to get much, much worse and Putin is showing every sign of acting more and more insane. We cannot escape the conclusion that Russia’s war on Ukraine is evidence that the world is on the brink of catastrophe.