Yes Putin gets more aggressive and it’s everyone ekes fault

I still remember my first nuclear drills.

We left class and went into the inner hallways and did the "duck and cover."

Putin thought the decadent West wasn't up to the challenge. He was wrong.

Number of western nations that will defend Ukraine militarily: 0

Again, its the worst kind of half-measure. We won't fight a winning war. We'll only make a losing war worse. We could have projected strength and stopped Putin with a hard line. We didn't. We told Putin he's free to waltz into Ukraine unopposed. Except instead of trying to ease tensions or resolve the war with as little harm as possible, we're trying to make it as bloody as possible.

The moment Bazi showed up I knew it was over.

Biden and our allies warned Putin that there would be consequences for invading. Biden even let slip his thinking that a minor incursion would be dealt with differently than a major invasion.

Yet Putin chose to go forward with his misguided plans for regime change anyway, and the West wasn't bluffing. The West is pursuing a middle ground, between your "let Putin get away with it, we're the baddies anyway" and "let's start World War 3 over Ukraine".

Putin's goal should be to ease tensions, and find an off ramp to this colossal mistake he made. Our goal should be to uphold the rules-based, neoliberal, neocon globalist order.

Simping for putin

If we wanted to hold Ukraine within the western sphere of influence, we shouldn't have had Joe Biden and the rest of NATO all say we're not going to oppose an invasion.
This "middle ground" has sent us to the most dangerous moment in the world in 60 years. We basically just raised a new iron curtain and divided the world while pointing nukes at each other and praying neither side gets too jumpy. Trying to point fingers and play the blame game doesn't accomplish anything. When the entire western world cuts off all interactions with Russia, but entirety of Asia and the mideast and India and most of African and South America don't follow suit, we're not playing geopolitics to our advantage, its the outcomes that matter, and this is one of the worst outcomes and on a dangerous path towards the worst possible.

We're just a single mistake away from nuclear annihilation right now. Decades of thawing relations and deescalation have been thrown out the window and we're back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now we're talking about sending US/EU irregulars to kill Russians in an active war zone and risk a direct military confrontation, something the Cold War didn't escalate to. Like another stupid form of "middle ground". The advantage of projecting strength is that you can avoid conflicts occurring in the first place if you speak quietly and carry a big stick. Only a madman would put down his guard and say the other person is free to trespass and then pick a fight after he crosses that line.

I mean fuck, at least when we made the miscalculations that led to Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya and Yemen, we had no real stakes. We weren't risking obliteration.