Anybody have an idea how this insanity can ever end? Seems Russia is willing to kill off a whole generation of young people. Will this just go on forever? Or will Ukraine run out of soldiers?
Time favours Ukraine. Absent a really shocking reversal in all western aid, they're surviving and advancing. Russia, meanwhile, is incurring deep structural damage to its economy that shows up already as huge labour shortages, high inflation, and high interest rates, along with war-driven destruction of infrastructure. It's steadily marching to a point where economic collapse, internal unrest, or both, demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine.
Putin either doesn't know or doesn't care that they're not winning, and any replacement for Putin will be Putin*2, so it'll take something societally catastrophic to force the issue, which becomes more likely every day. As long as Ukraine just hangs on, they win by not losing.
I don't know that it can end from anything short of that.
Of course they didn’t represent the whole of Russia, but as anyone living next to them will tell you, the further east you go, the more „cooperation through domination” mindset there is. Win-win is a very much western thing.
Are we really saying that Russians are somehow essentially warmongering in a way that other nations simply aren't? That this can't be changed?
Historically, great defeats caused such cultures to change - look at Germany or Japan. In Russia there was a similar movement in 1991 but it sadly collapsed and they are back at it again.
I would highly reading "Imperium" (Empire) by Ryszard Kapuściński https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium_(Kapu%C5%9Bci%C5%84sk... to get a better understanding of why nations neighboring Russia do not believe that.
The mindset you suggest is laudable, and much easier to entertain from a certain distance.