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It is sickening, but that's the world. Absent foreign intervention (and Ukraine has been lavishly supplied by foreign benefactors relative to the Confederacy) Ukraine finds itself in roughly the same situation as the Southern Confederacy did during the American Civil War (and the combat looks a lot like the eastern theater of that war, aka. a static attritional grind with both sides unable to adapt to the fact that technological advances have invalidated their tactics,), outnumbered by the foreign enemy and stuck with frontier territories of dubious loyalty (There are probably more Ukrainians fighting in the Russian army than all foreign volunteers fighting for Ukraine combined. General Sherman's personal escort during the March to the Sea was a cavalry regiment from north Alabama.).
As a Southerner, at what point did/does the dying cease to be worth it? In retrospect I find myself angry with the likes of Jefferson Davis, brave with the lives of people like me and for what? Being perpetually poorer than the north? The "slaveocracy" whose idea of white supremacy was to import, support, and nourish ever more non-whites? The CSA richly deserved to die, and the only tragedy is that Southerners were shockingly able and brave enough to keep the war going and incur genocide-tier casualties in doing so. Ukraine pre-2014 had transformed itself from one of the better off Soviet republics to one of the poorest countries in Europe, literally worse off than Belarus.
I don't proclaim myself able to speak for Russians or Ukrainians, but from my perspective as an American this war isn't our war. I don't like the eastern-European emigres who have far too much influence in our government. There isn't going to be justice in that region. Justice probably entails digging up the graves of those responsible for failing to manage the fragmentation of the USSR into at least a customs union.
They’ve had foreign intervention and still can’t drive out the Russian military. I think honestly we should have stayed out from the start as we’ve just made them lose more slowly which means more deaths and destruction. Ukraine almost fell in tge first weeks of tge war, and if it had, Ukraine would be in better shape even if the Ukrainians like tge west more. Live under Russia, or die in a ditch so those who survive can … live under a Russia.
Why? It allowed the US to blow up some pipelines consequence free and completely tanked the German/European economy, blew up a bunch of Russian materiel, and forced European higher-ups to spend sociofinancial resources on something they really, really hate (their fighting-age men).
The only people who care less about Ukrainian lives than the US does are the Ukrainians themselves. Granted, the US put a lot of effort into assuring the Ukrainian people they wouldn't lose those lives- but American assurances over the last 60 years where they haven't directly intervened in a conflict have been worth jack shit (ignoring Israel for... reasons).
I see the same bellicose rhetoric thrown around among Canadian Boomers angry about Orange Man's taxes- the only people who care less about Canadian standards of living than the Americans are Canadians.
The point is that the people who don't want to live under a Russia are dead (wars are not functionally distinguishable from mass suicides), and no man, no problem, as they say.
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