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Russian reputation would be in a better place, IMHO, if they'd withdrawn to roughly Feb 24th lines in April when it was apparent Kiev would not fall, Putin had given a speech about how they'd "Taught the Nazis a lesson they won't soon forget" and declared victory. Doubling down with summer offensives and fall debacles and sham annexations has been the loss here. Ukraine is nowhere near NATO membership today, last year, next year, or any time in two decades.
That's not what NATO has said in the past (I believe the United States said that Ukraine would be allowed to join a few years ago) and it's not what Ukraine is saying now.
But you know, commentators like you would have told us that of course Poland or the Baltics or Finland would never be allowed to join NATO in the mid-90s. A commitment, like others, that the United States reneged upon. Funny how doing stuff like that isn't damaging to 'credibility' - almost like the only thing that matters in international relations is power and money. Russia's mistake was being weak and poor, and now all that's left is to decide whether they want to lose now or later.
A commitment the United States never made.
They could have simply not picked the fight, and kept selling Germans oil and gas.
I think we both agree that Russia should not have gone to war in the first place. But again, that would just be choosing a slow death rather than a quicker one. Ukraine would have been integrated into NATO, and then Russia could have been destroyed at Washington's leisure.
The United States did not really make a commitment, because I don't believe that commitments or agreements between enemies are binding. Commitments that cannot be enforced don't exist, and Russia is demonstrating right now their inability to enforce anything even on their own doorstep. But they certainly let the Russians think they made such a commitment!
Certainly agreements between enemies can be binding. One example would be a peace treaty. Penalty for breaking a peace treaty, ultimately, is resumption of hostilities. There was no treaty of any sort promising Russia that Poland or the Baltics or Finland would never be allowed to join NATO, and such a treaty is the only way the United States has to make such a commitment. So it's not some weird technicality; the United States plainly never made such a commitment.
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Fairness Russia didn’t have the option to just keep selling oil and gas to Germany. Population collapse was slowly occurring and they had to do something or Russia disappears in a generation. Probably get internally conquored by high birth rate chechens.
Killing off the young men who could be having babies by having them kill your fellow east slavic young men is the single best way to see your population decline more.
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