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So do I. NATO and Ukraine kept poking the bear, now they are indignant that the bear swiped back. Don’t get me wrong, I think Russia is wrong to start the war and Ukraine has every right to fight back, just that neither side is innocent of the blood spilled.

I fear this will become pretext to a wider conflict. Too many seem to want war, both in our government and in China.

We’ll I agree, too. What is desperately
Needed here is some strong international figure to try to broker an end to this. The office of the papacy naturally suggests itself, but there heretic Francis is absent without leave. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a Catholic and no Francis fan, but if he has a job to do in this it’s to try to end it, not sit in the sidelines and take political potshots

It sounds to me like the elderly Argentinian Leftist who runs the Vatican is just taking a shot at the US. More than that, the substantive point is plain wrong.

In the 1990s, at the start of Putin's political career in St. Petersburg, he made clear to Andrew Goodman, an American diplomat he dealt with regularly, that he believed Russia had to recover her superpower status and pursue it own interests and purposes. And in Putin's assessment, which he repeatedly discussed in public, for Russia to recover its superpower status required dominating the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Republics -- including Ukraine. In essence, Ukraine, a major economic and geographic prize, was always on Putin's target list.

Why did Putin attack Ukraine this year? The time seemed ripe. After spending many billions of dollars upgrading Russia's weaponry, his military seemed up to the task, intel reports corroborated Putin's view that Ukraine would not put up much of a fight, and the West had made clear that Ukraine was not going to be admitted to NATO anytime soon or get the benefit of NATO troops or a security guarantee. After all, Putin now controlled a major share of Europe's energy supply, which seemed to provide a Russian veto over NATO actions.

There is also a growing belief among experts that an aging and ailing Putin also calculated that time is running out for him. In sum, the US and NATO did not provoke or prompt Putin's attack on Ukraine. It was instead a result of Putin's long held plans, beliefs, and delusions, spurred along by Putin's growing sense of his mortality. In that frame of mind, Putin, by nature a careful planner and not at all reckless, took a self-destructive gamble that has gone wrong.