[Targan]

It's pretty obvious that the biggest mistake Ukraine made wasn't in 2013, or 2014, or at any time during the current hot phase of their conflict with Russia. Ukraine's biggest mistake was in 1994 when it believed that the security assurances given by Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States were worth any more than the paper they were written on.

Giving Ukraine just enough equipment and ordnance to keep the conflict at a stalemate isn't doing anyone any good. Soldiers on both sides keep dying in appalling numbers, the Russians continue to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity on a daily basis while the western world watches on and makes "tut-tut" noises, and Putin knows with almost total certainty that given time, the rest of the world will stop caring enough and he'll get what he wants.

If the west wasn't going to intervene properly at the start, with a Ukraine-wide no-fly zone and even better, boots on the ground, then we should have given the Ukrainians everything they needed, from day one. What's the point of helping someone fight a war if you know the help isn't sufficient to guarantee they'll win? At this point I genuinely can't judge whether or not Ukraine would be better off capitulating.

Many of us are Cold War kids. Teenaged me would be utterly horrified and totally confused if I was brought forward in time and saw this travesty underway today. It's like testosterone levels dropped by 80% over the last 30 years.