> It's clear Russia isn't going to stop. Putin would find it extremely embarrassing and politically harmful to just stop without getting anything out of it.
If the US has Eastern Ukraine, we can place missiles inside the Russian's early warning threshhold aimed at Moscow (Think Cuban Missile Crisis but worse). There are no true geographical barriers from driving tank divisions from Ukraine into Russia proper.
US policymakers have repeatedly stated their aim is to remove Putin, and they have plans to break up the country.
For the Russians, this is an existential crisis.
> All those sanctions, all that money, all those lives lost would be all for nothing.
The current Administration and their allies in Congress will fight to the last Ukrainian.
They are attempting to weaken Russian through a proxy war (Think Afghanistan or Vietnam). They are not defending Ukraine.
If the US administrations truly wanted peace they would have signed up for permanent no-NATO agreements as Dr. Mearsheimer has pointed out.
But having Ukraine become Switzerland would not benefit the US' current warlike ambitions, nor would it assist the plundering of the incredibly valuable resources of Ukraine. Zelensky's platform for peace, when he was elected, was destroyed by the Banderistas in Western Ukraine who have been prepping for war, or executingi
> If giving weapons to Ukraine is a good thing at all then the most moral option to me is giving Ukraine the means to achieve a swift, decisive win. Keeping things even has no legitimate purpose to it, it only gets more people killed on both sides.
Because this is an existential crisis to the Russians, they will continue ramping up their warmachine to support this war.
The Russian army is really designed for this type of combat, and they won't have a better chance. Now, they might have misjudged the level of Ukrainian resistance, and the Western support, but now they are just rubbling cities and targeting everything. The worst of WW1 & WW2 is back.
Each time we give the Ukrainians weapons we stall the inevitable, and we ensure that more Ukrainians will die.