When it comes to defending Moscow, you've got to sand it to Putin!

What just happened in Russia? Does anyone know? Has one 24-hour period in world history ever produced so many losers? This was like Final Jeopardy where all three contestants bet everything they have and all three get the question wrong.

Or it would be if all three Jeopardy contestants had access to nuclear weapons.

First of all, I feel like a loser because — sensing that he might now become more than just a historical footnote — I took the good time and trouble to learn how to pronounce “Yevgeniy Prigozhin.”

And Prigozhin himself came out a loser, exiled to Belarus, a country, Wikipedia says, that “is landlocked, relatively flat, and contains large tracts of marshy land.” There’s your Chamber of Commerce snapshot: Come for the prairie, stay for the swamp.

It also noted that 70% of Chernobyl’s radiation ended up in Belarus. So it has that going for it. Which is nice. It’s probably preferable to the Russian front, but do you really want to be exiled there?

The Ukranians were also losers in the sense that for one brief moment in time the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine extended upon the land as Prigozhin and 25,000 of the only decent fighters that Russia has, abandoned the fight and turned their guns toward Moscow.

Had Prigozhin —  the Antonio Brown of mercenary leaders, always taking to social media to complain about something — not gotten cold feet it would have been easy to see Russia pulling its armed forces out of occupied Ukraine to defend its own capital. But then, half a day later everything was back to what passes for normal in that neck of the woods.

And certainly civilization was a loser because —  whoa. Isn’t there a provision in the U.N. charter, maybe somewhere in the back, that if a nuclear nation loses its marbles the world can go in and take its nukes for safekeeping until it gets its act together? Like the way our parents would take away the Lawn Darts until we learned to throw them only at the target and not at each other.

And the biggest loser of all had to be Vladimir Putin. I wonder what Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson think of their boy now, now that he has acted all woke and sissified, resorting to a compromise instead of acting like the strongman they so admire, and crushing the opposition like a bug. What a waste of a good bloodthirsty tyrant.

And unlike other disasters that Putin has been able to wiggle out of by censoring the news or blaming foreign meddlers, this one played out right in the open for all Muscovites to see. They had 25k battle-hardened soldiers bearing down on their kisser, and the best resistance Putin could think of was dumping hundreds of truckloads of sand on the highway to block their route.

Sand.

Them: AK-205 carbines, PP-19 Vityaz submachine guns, GM-94 multi shot grenade launchers, RPG-28 anti-tank rocket launchers, 152mm self propelled howitzers.

Putin: Sand.

And who knows where the P-dog even was? He disappeared from sight, skedaddling like Josh Hawley running from his own supporters in the halls of Congress. After calling Prigozhin “scum” and a “traitor” and promising that punishment would be “brutal,” he let an armed insurrection entirely off the hook.

And our U.S. Congress was up to the job. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene were in close contact with our intelligence agencies, commenting on the gravity of, potentially, one of the great turning points in world history playing out in front of our very eyes.

Actually, I have that wrong. Instead, over the weekend, they were tweeting about Hunter Biden and something called “trantifa.” (Sorry, no clue.)

Sand.

Obviously, no one thinks we’ve heard the end of this. If Putin and Prigozhin are sleeping at night, it’s only courtesy of a heavy dosage of Ambien and Stoli. It couldn’t happen to a nicer couple.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: The coup that wasn't lays bare the absurdity of Russia's actions