Every time I see this canard on Free Republic, I reflect on how dumb the poster has to be to have that thought in his or her head.
"existential threat" describes the Russian situation.
As Timber Rattler in post 49 observes as his possible "mediation" effort: "What's to mediate? The Russians need to leave Ukraine and stop attacking it. Period."
Meanwile cronos says "Everyone is trying to mediate an end to the war."
So if he asks, "what's to mediate," then all the subsequent discussion about mediation devolves to Clinton's famous "it depends on the meaning of 'is;," and so everything depends on whatever the meaning of mediation is.
At this point, and without regard to the factions here on FR, I suspect that what many now call a "proxy" war has no "mediation" answer in the moment.
One side will run out of men and munitions first. Time will tell. Interim opinions will not.
In a similar manner, one side will survive the sanctions more successfully than another. So the war seems to be larger by far than many think. Unipolar is watching multipolar emerge, so I'd say all bets are off.
Existenti6threat is the Putin situation.
Putin, whi has been in power as a dictator for 22 years is threatened by an east Slavic state heading towards democracy and no corruption. That offends his Mongolic ie Moscowite mindset and is an existential threat to Putin. If the people of Russia got an example in Ukraine that they don’t have yo tolerate the corruption of Tsar Putin and his oligarchs, they would oust him.