I understand the want for peace for Ukraine, but Ukraine is not in a nuclear standoff with Russia.<p>If Russia invades a smaller nation under false pretense, and that said smaller nation continues to win against Russia. The smaller nation holds all of the chips at the table. Especially when Russia is pulling out 60 year old milsurp.
1. The West already appeased Putin in 2014 by allowing him to have Crimea. All it led to was him trying to take over more of Ukraine.<p>2. Random bloggers and Twits repeating it every time they talk about this will not make this a U.S. driven proxy war. Russia started this war and Russia can end this war. No one provoked or asked Russia to do so as much as these clowns may point to some unwritten verbal agreement in the middle of negotiations which never made it to the actual negotiation document in the early 90s as provocation.<p>3. No, the U.S. isn’t the only country in the world with agency. Ukraine has agency. As does Russia. Russia can end this war overnight by not taking over another country’s land in breach of basically every treaty and the UN charter and basic common sense. And Russia can end the threat of nukes by not nuking. Unlike the Cold War where the USSR could legitimately be afraid of a nuke from the US, there is no such threat today whatsoever. Russia was barely a top 10 economy when this war started and it will only be economically worse since then. It’s military threat has been comically exposed by Ukrainian doctors and plumbers moonlighting as soldiers. It’s weapons cannot stand up to old generation cast off NATO weaponry being used by people learning how to operate them on the fly.<p>All it has at this point is nukes. That’s it. And if it’s rewarded for the threat of nukes now it will continue using that threat to win increasingly greater concessions until the RoW cannot keep giving it things and it actually uses it, but now from a position of much greater strength, in a standoff which might actually be supported by the Russian people as opposed to this clown show which most see as and know to be one man’s ego trip.
During the last nuclear standoff, fortunately we didn't have idiotic Twitter takes that influence politicians to make it politically impossible to give the opponents leadership some conceivable out to the conflict.
Russia is not USSR, the optics/politics that drove peer power compromise isn't there, even if prudent. West also feels ideologically less realist than ever. Feels because there's also terrifyingly perverse realist incentive to push RU into tactical nuclear use to isolate her further.