A few last points:
There are no morals in war. War is an immoral act. The best you can do if you go to war is to make sure you have a Just War. When we pushed this into a war by putting the Russians in a position where they can articulate a realistic security threat to themselves, we lost that argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory
Up until October 2021, we can make the argument that arming, training, and feeding Ukraine intel was defensive and intended to prevent a true war of aggression by Russia (i.e. create a cost if Russia invades). But once we pulled the lever on unconditional NATO membership in October 2021 and tried to fastrack this, ignoring anything the Russians said, we lost that argument entirely. At that point we became the antagonist of war and threatened someone else (yes, putting tanks and missiles on Russia’s border is a threat to them even, if in your mind we’re always the good guys).
Post Cold War, and especially post 9-11, the US has changed dramatically. We today have an expeditionary military used to further our political and economic agenda in a vacuum of any true national security argument. We have become offensive (Libya 2011, Iraq 2003, Venezuela 2020) not defensive and our cause is seldom our own security. (1) Post Cold War left the US as the only true worlds super power. This created a situation where there are no consequences for our actions. We act with impunity, break conventions, withdraw from agreements, lie, cheat, are hypocrites and simply do what we want since the ultimate underwriter of a foreign policy is the military. (2) Post 9-11 what began as a GWOT (a term no longer used) morphed into our policy makers using our military as a foreign legion in pursuit of economic and political interests. Instead of the GWOT drawing down, our huge defense and intel budgets remained, our large oversea footprint continued, and we simply began to shift to new targets that have NOTHING to do with our national security in reality, example: Syria, Venezuela, attacking Libya, now Ukraine...
Back to Ukraine: You nor anyone else can articulate a viable national security argument for what we did. Because there isn’t one.
What the proponents of this stupid war are left with are Cold War boogieman arguments that are not even remotely based on a realistic capability of the Russian military nor realistic regards their economy and political system.
What you also cannot realistically argue, is that we Americans are wealthier, safer, or more free because of this.
So what was this war? It was pure arrogance. We are strong (political, economic, military), Russia is weak, and we do what we want.
And in the meantime, we talk about moral BS causes like democracy, human rights, sovereignty, all while we literally support kingdoms in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, have mainland China (a single party communist regime with the a rights record about as bad as it comes) as our #1 trade partner, as our most favored trade partner, who we helped into the WTO (the same year tanks rolled of pro democracy students on Tienanmen square)... Did we care about Libya’s or Iraq’s sovereignty when we invaded or attacked them? Do we care about some of the Pacific Islands sovereignty whom we bully to prevent the Chinese from gaining naval ports in the Pacific? These ideas are today selectively pulled from our @ss whenever we want to go to war and have no justification.
Just curious, if Russia is not a threat to anyone, and NATO has been on the border of Russia for years and never attacked, why does taking Ukraine or parts of Ukraine help Russia
Russia was trading freely with the west, west was investing in Russia, much of that is gone now along with large portions of Russian military equipment and soviet legacy equipment along with that little thing of 10s of thousands killed and wounded
In a war with NATO the advantages Russia has will be minimal.
They succeed now because of artillery and air power advantages( degraded a bit over the last few days), and manpower. A war with NATO would eliminate air annd artillery advantage pretty quick, and industrial targets that Russia can’t protect against drones now would likely be hit as well.