Ukraine's spectacular punch in Putin's gut, and I hate to say this, but ...

There's a scene in the 1962 film The Longest Day in which a giddy elderly Frenchman dances joyfully amid the scattered debris of his Normandy home's shattered windows caused by enormously powerful reverberations from Allied shelling on D-Day.

No dancing, but my giddiness nearly matched his when reading about Ukraine's extraordinary long-range assault — codenamed "Spider Web" — on four Russian airbases, destroying roughly a third of the warring regime's strategic bombers. Here's some charming footage of President Zelensky's Russian Airfield Beautification Project at work.

So much for a few of the on-average $175-million flying monstrosities that Vladimir Putin deploys to massacre Ukrainian women and children, from Kharkiv to Odesa. One war-defining fact immensely important to reinforce among world opinion is that Zelensky oversees, orders and restricts his victimized nation's assaults on Russian military assets only.

But Putin never disappoints. He in turn ordered his Goebbelsesque blatherskite factory and fictitious "defense" ministry to label Ukraine's strike a "terrorist attack" — a curious feat indeed when conducted on a Góringlike Luftwaffe. In similar fashion did Russia's prowar couch bloggers designate Ukraine's defensive strike as the fatherland's "Pearl Harbor."

Curiouser yet is that America's Newsweek reports that "observers" — mysterious beings neither here nor there, it would seem, since they're unidentified in the story — have "branded" the attack as "Russia's Pearl Harbor." Which is a grossly upside-down, inverted and twisted epithet.

Nonetheless, surprise — as in surprising — is a useful word to describe Ukraine's tactical brilliance in conceiving and carrying out the vast drone operation. No one outside the sure trustworthiness of Zelensky's advisory circle — namely, the carelessly logorrheic imbecile in the White House — was informed of the plan throughout its potentially treacherous, year-and-a-half making.

Afterward, it got even better. In following up on this striking success, so to speak, Ukraine's president went deliciously transparent in Vlad-you-can-shove-this-up-your-fascist-ass intel. "What’s most interesting, and this can now be stated publicly," announced Zelensky, "is that the 'office' of our operation on Russian territory was located directly next to [Security Service] headquarters in one of their regions."

Yet profoundly sobering is the bipartisan reminder delivered yesterday by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal after "touring neighborhoods shattered by what they called the worst Russian bombardments since the full-scale invasion began." (AP) Said Graham, "What I learned on this trip was [Putin's] preparing for more war. We saw credible evidence of a summer or early fall invasion." Blumenthal added that "It is crunch time for Putin and for the world because Russia is mounting a new offensive."

About that "world," the free half of which once had a leader. To counter Russia's unprovoked invasion and continuation of medieval butchery, the two Ukraine-visiting U.S. legislators — the executive branch's commandingly oblivious chief is of course irrelevant here — are calling for ... more sanctions.

Blumenthal called what they have on paper is "bone-crushing" and Graham said it's “the most draconian bill I’ve ever seen in my life in the Senate." Hyperbole aside, their legislative proposal is wickedly severe. It would slap 500% tariffs "on countries that continue buying Russian oil, gas, uranium and other exports — targeting nations like China and India" that consume 70% of Putin's energy exports and thus finance his insane imperialist jihad.

Now for the political kicker to which we are so accustomed. The AP further reports that the bill is "backed by nearly the entire U.S. Senate but still facing uncertain odds in Washington." But even apart from the politics of indifferent House Republicans, to me, at least, the sanctions bill raises a rather troubling question of domestic consequence. I'm trying to guess how soon macroeconomic computer models would explode in exhausting attempts to calculate the devastating fallout from a 500% tax on America's imported goods.

At any rate, more sanctions — any kind, any degree, any severity — would face what is no uncertainty at all: Putin ain't about to retreat from international villainy; he's deadset on crushing Ukraine, killing its sovereignty, and swallowing it whole. This year, next year, however long he's alive. Another Eastern European victim to follow — geopolitical victimization writ even larger as likeminded Vladimir Putins exploit the loathsome historic absence of the free world's most powerful defender.