America has also been utterly incapable of putting this out. Or even of handling Iran (which they didn't need to engage to begin with)
Blocking the sale of Russian oil forced the EU to purchase US oil at a premium. Not conducive to ending the war from the US perspective.
Continued combat in Ukraine requires the purchase of US armament. Not conducive to ending the war from the US perspective.
The EU being a supplicant strengthened the US hand in trade negotiations. Not conducive to ending the war from the US perspective.
Probably much more that we don't know about driving the current situation.
But I could if I wanted.
The wars have been very profitable for certain people who planned for it.
> Trump aims to increase US military spending to $1.5 trillion by 2027
> EU member states' defence expenditure sharply increased between 2021 and 2026. In 2025, member states' defence expenditure reached €418 billion, rising for the 11th consecutive year. In 2026, it is expected to reach an estimated €454 billion. This means that defence expenditure has increased by 75.3% compared with 2021.
EU defense spending is a tiny fraction of their total spending so I'm not sure what your point is there.
Most events have some people who benefit and others who are hurt but that doesnt suggest that the people who benefit have a hand in starting those events. There needs to be some actual evidence for that to even be considered.
War with Russia does not mean nuclear war with Russia. As we can clearly see from what Ukraine is doing to Moscow et al.
Also, an aggressive stance in fighting Russia, would have caught them early on when their military was entirely a disaster. The beating would have been an epic humiliation. Instead Russia has spent years re-learning how to wage war, which is not what you actually want.
What mechanism gives the US the power to tell Russian planes where they can and cannot fly? The US cannot simply mark an area on a map. It would have to, at a minimum, deploy a series of surface-to-air missile sites to actually shoot down those planes that violated the map.
It's anything but straightforward.
Ukraine is about 800 miles east-west and 550 north-south; Rammstein's another 800 miles from Kyiv. At Mach 1.2, you're talking about an hour to get to Ukraine and another hour to get to the eastern extent of it, plus the time it takes to go to an in-flight refuelling aircraft multiple times along the way.
It'd be equivalent to trying to establish a no-fly over the whole of Texas, basing out of Chicago, while there are SAM sites in Mexico and California waiting to shoot you out of the sky and aircraft launching missiles from within Mexico with the chance of starting WW3 if you retaliate.
The number of aircraft you'd need would be massive - not just fighters, but AWACS, tankers, search and rescue, you name it. You'd have to have coverage all the way down whatever corridor you were using to get aircraft in and out of the area too.
Now sure, you could (instead of scrambling to intercept) fly combat air patrols over Ukraine and shoot down anything that comes in which might reduce the time-to-intercept to something more acceptable. You still have to cover a massive amount of airspace though!
To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk. It would almost certainly result in a couple fighter planes being shot down.
> To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk.
Agreed, I think the biggest issue is the political and strategic risk. In the early days of the war, there was a lot of "it worked for Iraq, just set up a no-fly" chat though.
Declaring a no fly zone would have achieved nothing. Sending air forces to enforce it would have done something. But what happens if American fighter jets engage Russians over Ukraine, while Russian air defenses support their air forces from their side of the border? Would Americans let Russians launch SAMs with impunity, or would they invade Russia, showing the world that Putin's justification for the war was in fact correct?
Maybe Putin would have chickened out when American jets show up, but you can't know that for sure. Which means you should probably decide in advance you far you are willing to escalate before you chicken out yourself.