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--- "The mark of a true politician is his ability to trick audiences into diverting attention from an embarrassing subject by fulminating on something else."

Indeed, you hit the bull-s eye there. Trick audiences into diverting attention.

So one's Overton window is 'politically' clamped down to two choices and two choices only. To wit: pay for the Zelensky government side in the war to oppose the Putin government, or be deemed a "Putin supporter." No third alternative is rhetorically allowed.

Except there are other and larger issues. And other points of view. The politician is the one who tries to divert attention from any but the hoped-for TWO alternatives.

Here's an alternative, which will be coming. Negotiate. Here's another, applicable to both sides in a war. Lose. Or win. Here's another: Europe enters the war formally on the side of the Zelensky government. Here's another: Europe rejects entering the war formally.

Governments come and go. Zelensky's and Putin's and Biden's and Macron's, and so on. The press is filled with partisan worries that the "populists" or "right" will win European elections in the next cycles, and thereby upset the current "apple cart." Many of these same European press voices are currently terribly worried about Trump winning a next term of office here. And these voices are ALL political. As is yours.

So playing the "true politician" is quite like playing the "no True Scotsman." There are a priori elements evident which don't like being seen. Yours is overtly political, and resists putting the Ukraine-Russia war beneath the larger frame of our nation's fiscal health. Strategic interests and all that. But MY largest strategic interest is in our survival by the demise of the Biden administration at our ballot box, and it trumps -- pun not intended -- a Zelensky administration or Putin administration survival. By a lot.

You argue "put it on the tab." I argue, don't. Herb Stein's advice will apply: what cannot continue will stop.