Twilight Zone stuff.
Had Russia or China loudly denounced the Iraq or Afgan invasions [neither of whom invaded their invaders], sent billions upon billions of $ to Saddam or the Taliban, and their most advanced weapons to kill as many American soldiers as possible, how’d you react?
Answer that and then maybe you’ll earn a seat at the table.
Big amounts of lithium in Afghanistan?
“Answer that and then maybe you’ll earn a seat at the table.”
Realpolitik says none of that matters, it’s a moral dimension for amateurs.
We, the US is faced with a clearly divergent set of essential interests compared to Ukraine.
Our first existential interest is to avoid war with Russia. No other interest anywhere supersedes that one. Our second interest is that the Ukrainian war stay in Ukraine.
We share NO interest with Ukraine. None. In fact their interests lie in the opposite of the above two principal interests the US has.
Release them to their fate. End all military and intelligence and economic support.
I disagree.
The recent history of Ukraine involves their voluntary surrender of nuclear weapons in exchange for independence from Russia and implied security guarantees from NATO and the USA.
There was no formal treaty, but Ukraine would have kept its nuclear weapons without those implied guarantees.
Also, Ukraine as part of Russia is a fairly recent historical and geographical concept.
In the last 2,000 years, all, or parts of, Ukraine have been under the control of the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, various central Asian tribes, Austria-Hungary, and the Polish Empire.