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Does the idea that disarmament, mutually agreed restraint and maintenance of norms are positive-sum not pop up in those discussions at all? At the very least, it doesn't seem like anyone (in your story, or what I see from Russian telegrammers or otherwise) is trying to seriously expand the game tree one step further and reason about how the balance changes if the other side also starts unabashedly executing POWs or whatever other ways of killing more $enemy are proposed down the line. I thought a standard European history education should have put some emphasis on how the various conventions of warfare emerged from Europe's historical experience in their absence (even if you want to have the edgy 14 year old's cynicism and say that it's just that the elites were spooked that the normlessness may come back to haunt them), but perhaps the connection from "Tired Professional Gentleman-Soldiers in colourful uniforms none of whom really wanted to be there anyway" to "the loathsome enemy right now barbarously rejecting the obvious truth of our narrative" is too much to draw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum has indicated that it works poorly with Russia.
The Iran deal, the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back and the long list of self proclaimed US exceptionalism gives the rest of the world strong reasons not to trust the US.
After Russia was kicked out of areas it occupied/controlled by force. Large part of that conquests was result of alliance with Third Reich and Hitler.
They were invited by nearly everyone for obvious reasons.
You do know that Slovakia and Croatia entirely owe their existence to Hitler's legacy, don't you? Without him and his decisions, neither country would exist.
Do you still hold their independence to be legitimate?
You also know that Poland signed a nonaggression pact with the Third Reich, and took part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, don't you?
Both Slovakia and Croatia existed as distinct parts of Czechoslovakia (it's in the name) and Yugoslavia before Hitler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banovina_of_Croatia
They did not preserve their independence past WW2.
Yes - "distinct parts" i.e. administrative areas and not nations, which is what they currently are, and claim to be.
Their independence after 1991 was, disregarding foreign help for a moment, only possible because they had a bygone legacy as independent states that was possible to resurrect, and they only existed as independent states pre-1945 due to Hitler's decisions and the Third Reich.
They weren't just "administrative areas". Croats, for example, already existed as a separate ethnonational entity back then.
What was Croatia before 1941 if not an administrative part of the Yugoslavian state?
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