I continue to be amazed how little the Budapest Agreement is mentioned in any of these articles. Forget NATO missiles on his border or anything else......if Ukraine still had their nukes none of this would have happened.
Secondly, if the idiot president and his minions can blame inflation on little putin, then they certainly could have seen this coming as a consequence of an invasion if it happened. So why not enact pre-invasion sanctions.
The germans/merkel have played the scoundrels in the background here, don't trust them now and haven't for a log time. Interestingly every time I was in Greece my cab drivers always said Merkel was the leader of the 4th Reich.
Dan, if ukrainians want to die for their country then I say arm them to the teeth with what they need. If you weren't going to do this from the start then they should have sent nothing. What no one knows though is if Ukraine had fallen in the 4-5 days the "intelligence" groups thought it would take, would they have stopped there?
PD, as you I've spent a ton of time reading about what got us here, but calling Zelenski a puppet is a mischaracterization and given how his election came about it had zero to do with being a puppet and more about doing what his predecessor didn't do. There was a very finite series of events that happened from the election of Zaleski's predecessor to his overthrown and the subsequent invasion in 2014. Our intelligence agencies are too stupid, ineffective and tribal to pull off a "coup" with a named predecessor in a matter of 3 months and that is about the timeline your looking at here.
As usual we're not going to agree on these things, but with the proper weaponry they can bleed the dam russian to death, yes it may be a costly for Ukraine, but from what I gather speaking with all my Ukrainian friends, even the ones who hated Zelensky before the war, they now support him wholly and the thought of giving up more territory to the russian is not up for negotiation.