I stand by position that Western countries should share responsibility for instigating the looming WWIII with Putin and his cabal, for Western analysts and officialdom clearly lack an expertise, or interest in history, or both, to better understand how states tend to sleepwalk into Weimar syndrome. Blind fixation on Orwellian-tinted motto "two big federated Slavic states bad, four young unitary independents good" amounted to catastrophic results during breakup of Yugoslavia; in Ukraine, where sociopolitical and cultural climate was, and remains, no less complex and turbulent, neocon agenda, curated by Biden, Nuland, Brzezinski, Blinken, et al., couldn't have delivered any better.

For just like Americans, esp. on the South, tend to remember times when they were separated by Mason-Dixon line, so we (wherever we happen to live — I haven’t visited Russia for good part of a decade) tend to recall times when we weren't divided. Some folks call such a feeling “imperialistic ressentiment”. That’s mostly wrong (excluding freaks of Dugin’s kin). For that, and for simple irresponsible solutions, I much despise the so-called "friends of Ukraine" who now chew the same fodder over and over, protracting the milling of the human mincemeat, whereas the best possible moment to stop kicking the can down the road to Hel, closing up shop, is already year and a half late, by Mark Milley’s prescient estimate. As one could say in Russian, не стоило засовывать на полшишечки (disconnected/half-hearted sex is worse than no sex).

Policy based on hopes to continue the war as long as it takes (if not till the end of the current electoral cycle), with no realistic goals instead of mythical 1991 borders of Ukraine, will inevitably result in cascade of failures inside Ukraine and the EU. Compare Iran-Iraq conflict in 1980s, which spanned 8 years without significant gains except “utilization” of surplus young fanatical proponents of the Islamic revolution. I recall that the West’d supported Iraq in this forgotten war, providing an abundance of financial, political, and logistical aid, hadn’t it? Well, it now can be confidently said that this aid didn’t come to much success in curating the Iraq democracy. The fate of Ukraine may turn out similar, for even now it closely resembles worst examples of Latam kleptocracies from the times of Operation Condor or Iran-Contra scam.