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"Option D: Apologise profusely to Russia and provide them with any support necessary to completely subjugate and annex Ukraine, in return for a promise that they will cooperate in containing China"
I think the choice of options you consider, and the ones you choose to ignore, is tendentious, and the arguments you present for them are based on a several load-bearing assumptions that you never justify. To begin with, you keep coming back to 1938 Germany comparisons, but in what way is Russia similar to it? Nazi Germany did not get bogged down in a stalemate in the Czechoslovakian trenches; Putin's Russia does not have the ideological basis for expansion or even risk-taking (except when they are deluded by bad intel), no shortage of land, resources or sea access, nor the demographics to support a mass war based on general mobilisation; nuclear MAD ensures that no actual existential interest of any major power can be violated; either way we are arguably in a setting where there is an increasingly realistic probability that either the US or China will go FOOM within a few years, which ought to completely reshape the risk-reward calculus if we were not so hardwired to follow established patterns.
How do you imagine that precedent would not exist otherwise? Azerbaijan just conquered territory with minimal effort from Armenia while everyone was looking at Ukraine, Israel somehow keeps growing, the US was having great successes bombing its way through Yugoslavia in the '90s, and BP, Exxon and Shell are currently yielding $billions in revenue per year in Iraq. Just because the median CNN consumer is successfully kept placid and morally assured by non-reporting (in the first case) or "we have received reports of whataboutist antisemitic misinformation, but rest assured these are totally different" (in the latter), that doesn't mean the entities that actually have agency over whether to engage in territorial conquest haven't been watching.
Most of territory they taken was already widely recognized as theirs, same as borders of Azerbaijan SSR.
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Why on earth does anyone think that a Russia hopped-up on revanchism is going to do a 180 and go "okay, bro, no problem, let's do this together" instead of being like "ha, fat chance, as if, Western imbeciles" if this were to come to pass? I don't care how synchronized the people are to the will of Putin or for whatever theory of Kremlinology you subscribe to, this sounds plain retarded spoken aloud, even putting aside how outside the Overton Window it is.
I put it in quotation marks for a reason. It's stupid, but not particularly more stupid than expecting Putin to pull a reverse Hitler (and Blitzkrieg his way within a few tens of kilometres of Berlin?) if we don't do whatever it takes to make him return Crimea to the Ukrainians now.
People have been wishfully thinking the idea that China could seize a part of the Russian Far East if Russia is sufficiently weakened for a long time. If you believe in this, you should be able to persuade the Russians that a resurgent China is more of a threat to them. Besides, if you actually believe that Putin pines for a great Gathering of Russian Lands, Port Arthur/Dalian seems like a much more valuable prize to offer him that is in the running (being the site of a great historical Russian battle - the smart Kremlinologist, looking to Serbia as a Mini-Me version of Russia, takes note of how and why they are so determined to retake the Kosovo).
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Russian World. A quote from here:
Idk, that sounds to me like ideological basis for expansion.
Apart from Ukraine, that maybe covers part of Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania at most, and they have only been talking about those populations less and less over the past several years (unlike, again, 1938s Germany, which only doubled and tripled down on its ideology). It seems like they have resigned themselves to writing them off.
This is also what that article talks about. From how the article is written, the "tragedy" expression seems to come from a longer sentence about Soviet Russian internal migrants who found themselves stuck abroad as a consequence of the SU collapse: "It was impossible for them to return, to reunite with their relatives. They didn't have a place of work, nor of residency. This is a great humanitarian tragedy, without exaggeration."
The thousand year quote does sound a little more ominous, but "we want to be powerful" is hardly an ideological basis for expansion in itself.
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