“When you’re riding a tiger, the hard part is getting off.”
- Chinese expression
There’s a saying in Chinese, ‘Qi hu nan xia.’
I apologise for not having inflections correct in this transliteration.
My keyboard does not include punctuation for pinyin.
The expression means: ‘ride tiger, difficult to dismount.’
Russia might have thought Ukraine would be like a cat.
A docile one.
Small and relatively tame.
But definitely small.
It had seemed small when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.
It provided valuable access to the Black Sea.
But some things change with time.
This time Russia anticipated their invading soldiers, in addition to finding Nazis to denazify and other imagined wrongs to right, would be welcomed with open arms and flowers by the locals.
Perhaps with sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flower), whose yellow petals might be strewn about in relief at the arrival of Russian soldiers.
