While I agree that, for this round at least, Russia started it by invading Ukraine on Joe Biden's enfeebled watch, I also know that Ukraine is a disgustingly corrupt country, and that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an undemocratic, party-banning tyrant who has taken a lot of US money and done, well, not much with it, hence the protracted war with no decisive outcome in sight. Zelenskyy just appeared at the White House to ask (read: beg rudely) for more useless cash, and the meeting was, to put it mildly, unpleasant.
I'm not totally on board with forging a Ukraine peace plan without Ukraine's presence, but I'm also chary of what role Ukraine—in the form of Zelenskyy—would take if it were invited to participate (a strong push for NATO membership, most likely, which Russia would abhor). If Trump's foreign policy has taught us anything, it's that he prefers negotiation to war, and what Zelenskyy is asking for is money to continue warring. Russia, meanwhile, has also been spending itself extravagantly in this conflict and is probably looking for a face-saving out. Fortunately for the US, Ukraine is considered more the bread basket of places like western Europe and Asia than the bread basket of the US, and it doesn't supply the US with much in terms of fuel, ores, etc. (The US has plenty of untapped resources in those areas, including the rare-earth minerals currently dominated by China, but domestic environmental groups insist that self-strangulation is better than harming Mother Gaia.)
Has anybody done a comprehensive survey of east-Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia? So much of this is about Russia's stated perception that eastern Ukraine is already effectively Russian, given the demographics, and the Russian propaganda point is that east Ukrainians feel as if they belong to Russia already, so why not redraw borders to let east Ukrainians know that they are officially back to being part of the motherland? But do the locals really feel that way? If so, where's the evidence?
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