The play by Russia is to get Ukraine to turn over it’s oil rich eastern territory to Russia or to a Pro-Russia independent state. In addition to the oil, it would give Russia almost total control of the Black sea.
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Why is this our concern? We have no stake in the Black Sea. And we could produce all the energy we need — if Biden and the other climate fearmongers would get out of the way.
It isn't if you read perhaps the best and most relevant book ever written about US Strategy, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control by RADM J.C. Wylie. As a maritime power our interests is open SLOCs to our trading partners on the other sides of Oceans. Land warfare in Central Asia has nothing to do with our interests and is a strategic distraction at best with the potential for disastrous over-reach.
For instance Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, its empire and its existence as an independent state because, first it was ambitious and arrogant and angered and terrified Sparta sparking the war. It ended in disaster for Athens when they decided to engage in a most excellent adventure wiith its entire fleet to Syracuse to take control of it as a matter of imperial prestige even though their empire was as a sea power trading among the islands and coastal city states of the Aegean and today's sea of Marmara. They gambled all and lost all. They were probably doomed anyway with the eventual rise of Macedonia and then Rome. But the point is, they lost their fleet, ceased to be a sea-power and were destroyed by a land power as a consequence.
"Them or us strategies" are too late by definition and invite the undesirable alternative.