It is a brutal, stupid, unnecessary war. Everyone involved in bringing it about, and everyone involved in perpetuating it should be ashamed.
It’s only stupid and unnecessary from our point of view.
From Putin’s point of view, the real mission has nothing to do with NATO or biolabs or even nazis in Ukraine (none of which actually bother Putin at all); it’s all about the Russkiy Mir (see http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68606) and creating a new world order based on Russian exceptionalism.
And that Russkiy Mir doesn’t look like a diaspora of sovereign equal states. It’s an ethnonationalist empire, plain and simple:
“In order to claim some kind of leadership — I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area — any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty ... Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”
Russia’s TV station pundits recently talked about the cost of that. They surmised that a long term occupation of Ukraine, with forced re-education and re-Russification, would a need to “pacify” up to 15% of the Ukrainian civilian population and eliminate up to a third of that number to account for incorrigible resistance.
For those who are seriously crap at even kindergarten level math, that means Russia’s own TV pundits and Duma don’t have a problem talking openly about having three million Ukrainians executed as part of a collective punishment for being ornery. Putin’s own plans say this generational punishment should last for two two generations.
The genocide that isn’t: <100 people a year were dying due to ongoing conflict in the Donbas, 2019-2022. Source: the DPR, i.e. the people who asked Putin to help end a genocide. Their own body counts.
Actual genocide: Putin’s surrender terms which effectively priced in the deaths of 3 million Ukrainians over two generations. If you simplify that to 20 years it means up to 150,000 a year. Civilians, that is. On top of military casualties.
So, if you put it in that very simple context - a diminishing genocide with 50 civilian corpses a year attributed to it versus a promised genocide with well over 100,000 civilians a year in the firing line - of course it doesn’t look so “unnecessary” from the Uke point of view.