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I just can't take the 1938 analogies.
In Russia and Ukraine, you have two countries that are reproducing well below replacement. The men that are dying will not be replaced. Hitler's plan was to depopulate Eastern Europe through mass starvation and then fill it with Germans. Russia's TFR is 1.8. The comparison is incredibly silly.
Nothing in the last three years makes me think that Putin has the resources, manpower, or desire to roll over Europe.
Russia has a clear causus belli with America extending our military footprint into Ukraine. And they have given us decades of warning that they would treat it as such. Kiev was the site of the founding of the Russian people, and it was a part of the modern state of Russia from 1686 to 1991, longer than the USA has been a country. Crimea was its only warm water naval base, and had been so for centuries.
Russia is not Nazi Germany, or even the USSR for that matter. It's not some intransigent ideological foe. It's a self-interested country going out of its way to act as predictably as possible and we can negotiate with it to our mutual interest. The United States is entirely in the driver's seat in how our relationship unfolds.
I tend to agree, with the added observation that Ukraine is of limited strategic significance. It has no vital resources (Taiwan at least has chip manufacturing), it doesn’t really grant NATO greater access to the Black Sea (Turkey is already in NATO). The government has significant corruption. And while Donbas has minerals, Ukraine has nothing much in that department. It’s rural farmland that’s rapidly depopulating, right next to Russia (which means even if we “win” Ukraine, you might end up exactly here ten years from now). I just don’t see much juice here worth the squeeze, and certainly nothing worth deploying troops and thus increasing the risk of nuclear war.
I think as such negotiations are probably the best we can do for Ukraine.
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