cmarshall

Which is why the Indians are buying Russian oil now then?

War reparations? From the Russians? You do have a vivid imagination. Who is going to occupy the Russian Federation and force them to pay reparations?

Oil is fungible. Someone will always buy Russian oil like the Indians are doing now. The US despite its efforts was never able to shutdown Iran's oil exports.

I'll take that bet.

The Russian Federation has neither the economic nor the military might to match Stalin's in 1945. Putin knows this. But frankly I don't worry about the Russians attacking yet another country. The rogue nation much more likely to do so is the US, cf. Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), and with eyes on Iran.

So, maybe the Russians will get tired of occupying Ukraine twenty years from now?

Same thing happened when the Finns defeated the Red Army in 1939. Subsequently, the Soviets corrected their deficiencies with the result that they still hold the Karelian Peninsula today.

According to the Hollywood version of the news. To the more sober-minded of us the notion that you are winning when you have a 150,000 strong armed force occupying your country is ridiculous.

Absolutely it does. And this is another direct result of the stupid and callous confrontation with Russia that the US has created with its unrelenting expansion of NATO. The main threat to the US is not from Russia, with its economy smaller than Texas, but from China whose economy has been larger than the US's since 2010 on a purchasing power parity basis. The US ought to have been making an ally of Russia against China, but instead has now pushed them into the Chinese camp since there is no where else for them to go. Smart think, US strategists!

It's called a sphere of influence. During the Cold War the US and the USSR acknowledged each other's spheres of influence and mostly avoided confrontations in those zones. When they failed to respect the opponent's sphere of influence such as in Cuba in 1962 all hell broker loose nearly resulting in a nuclear exchange. But then after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the triumphant US decided unilaterally that it had no such similar obligation to respect any sphere of influence of the Russian Federation. The current ongoing destruction of Ukraine is the direct result of the Americans' hubris.

So, you missed the point about how the US's supplying arms to Ukraine against the Russians already puts them in the Western alliance?

One avoids confronting a nuclear power not out of respect, but out of the most justified fear imaginable. If the Ukrainians and the US manage to push Putin into a corner he will use his nukes. Ukraine cannot win. They should realize this, distance themselves from the US, and work out whatever accommodation with Putin that they can. If not the Western media will cheer the Ukrainian heroism until there is nothing left but rubble.

There may indeed be downsides for Russia, but nothing that is going to prevent them from achieving their goal of destroying Ukraine.

You are confusing the world you wish with the world you have. In some abstract sense Ukraine ought to be able to align itself with the West if it wishes to, but the simple reality, as Putin is now demonstrating unambiguously, is that it can't, because Putin won't let them. And the West is not going to stop him. So, the Ukrainians' choice is Rubble or Russian; nothing else is possible. Beyond the Holodomor the Ukrainians bore the brunt of WWII. That still doesn't mean that somehow they are now in a position to defeat the invading Russian army of 150,000 troops. That is not going to happen. The destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan by the Americans disqualifies them from calling Putin a war criminal.

What I think is that Putin, as he has warned repeatedly, cannot and will not tolerate a neighboring state going over to the NATO/EU side of the enemy. So, he will destroy it. That is his goal and is an effective warning to other similar states belonging to the Russian sphere of influence. With respect to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have a truly impressive ability to ignore the obvious. When Colin Powell was lying through his teeth to the UN that Iraq had WMD even though the UN inspector reported that they had no such program and that Iraq had participated in 9/11 even though the Baathists and Al Queda were on opposite sides, I, like lots of other people, knew then that none of it was true. And then after they invaded it turned out that there never was any evidence to support any of the American lies. Seems to qualify as a conspiracy to me. And most of the $8 trillion cost of those wars went to the military and defense contractors like Halliburton, VP Cheney's old company that made $40 billion out of the war, much of which came from non-competitive contracts. But please continue to bury your head in the sand. You'll remain a proud American.