yes, i am admittedly biased here because that’s where i am from.
of course it’s gibberish because we are not operating with perfect insight into what both ukraine and russia know about each other on the ground. but i don’t see any outs for putin right now, barring an offramp of his own choosing. he will have to mobilize and he is prepared to use his nuclear threats. he has said that for years. he doesn’t err on the conservative side. his miscalculations are almost always catastrophic. you said it yourself there are no targets in ukraine or anywhere else that are tactical for russia.
the view that putin will not use nukes is predicated on the assumption (still!) that he will win or at least claim to have won in ukraine. that’s not going very well, and i don’t see how even the thickest of information fog can bring you to the conclusion that watching the fire enveloping 44m is the only sane response. scratch that, the crisis is 44m of ukranians plus millions of fleeing russians.
yes, the apparent racism is obvious. i’m not defending the policy to stay away from human catastrophes because of sklansky deaths. i am proposing that interventions are necessarily situational to where they can be first of all won, and equally material to whether the world community will support them.
treating it like czech/hungarian uprisings is erroneous, for instance nato power imbalance wasn’t yet what it is now, there wasn’t an EU or global integration like there is now.
treating it like the war in the balkans is also unrealistic, that conflict is described as both the west sat and allowed it to happen, AND at the same time western phantom strikes in serbia were serious violations of international law. like those things are completely ignoring years of how events actually unfolded and how many off-ramps were in fact not taken by war criminals.
yemen, syria, ethiopia, uygurs. you are right of course that the policy we chose didn’t do enough to stop those very real very evil crimes. which is the entire point that we must do something different now. i am not in the mood to equivocate that it would be unfair to the victims of those atrocities if the west saves ukraine now.