Vladimir Putin is a man who doesn’t heed his own advice. He likes to tell a now-famous story from his boyhood days in St. Petersburg that he says he learned a lifelong lesson from. According to him, he and his friends went chasing rats with sticks one day in the apartment building where they lived. In the frenzy, he made the mistake of cornering a “huge rat.” Left with nowhere to go, the rodent frantically threw itself at him, sending the young Putin running for dear life.

Putin’s telling of the story has been interpreted by foreign policy experts as a warning to the West not to push Russia too far and end up backing it into a corner. The tale has been invoked quite frequently in recent years as Putin has expressed increasing unhappiness about Ukraine’s efforts to join the EU and NATO. When he launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022, it was apparently his way of saying that he had been trapped with no escape route, and his only option was to lash out.

As the war has dragged on over the last two-and-a-half years, Putin has used the same narrative to warn the West that if it continued to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, Russia would be forced to go nuclear. He has managed, quite successfully, to intimidate the U.S. and its allies. They have either withheld some of the weapons Ukraine says it needs to defend itself effectively, or have severely restricted where and how Ukraine can use the ones provided to it.

Seemingly, Putin completely forgot to think about how the brutality of his war, especially the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Ukraine by his forces, would leave the Ukrainians no choice but to fight back. In a surprise attack that began on August 6, as many as 10,000 Ukrainian troops in tanks and armored vehicles entered Russia’s Kursk region from several directions, taking large numbers of Russian soldiers prisoner along the way. Within a week, they have reportedly captured 74 towns and settlements, and Ukraine now controls about 400 square miles of Russian territory. New reports emerged yesterday that Ukrainian troops have launched a second attack, this time on Russia’s Belgorod region. The Russian authorities have declared states of emergency in both regions, with about 300,000 civilians being evacuated.

However this war ends, these plucky Ukrainians have been quite a revelation. The bravery and ingenuity they have displayed in the face of relentless bombardment by their much larger neighbor will be studied by historians and military analysts for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps it is NATO that should be begging Ukraine to join the alliance, not the other way round.

The whole world is watching to see how the Kremlin will respond to the huge embarrassment that Russia has suffered over the course of this past week, something the White House has described as a “dilemma” for Putin. As a young boy in St. Petersburg, he chose to run when the desperate rodent lashed out at him. Is he going to stand and continue brandishing his stick this time around, or will he once again exercise proper judgment?