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I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
"they" that you talking about is an abstract nation-state entity called "Ukraine" and/or its rulers. We peaceniks don't mean them when we say that immediate ceasefire is in everyone's interest. We talk about actual everyday people who suffer, who are locked in this country and are forced to fight. I don't see how nationalists' tears about lines on the map or pride of a certain someone are worth hundreds deaths every day.
If Ukrainians actually want to fight to the end then open the borders, make army volunteer only, maybe pay enough to recruit people willingly(which is still terrible because this willingness both in Ukraine and Russia comes from the utter poverty that its rulers are responsible for). If the problem is with security after the war then you can either get it with joining Nato or at least adjacent web of alliances or you don't and continuing the war won't solve this.
Wasnt that basically Heinlein's take? Any nation that requires conscription doesn't deserve to continue to survive? The problem, of course, being that in that case the world may end up with only "nations that don't deserve to survive" on the map.
For this reason, conscription is ironically good because it allows meatgrinder-wars that eliminate the populations of “nations that don’t deserve to survive.” If we do this enough we might end up with some deserving nations coming up.
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