Thank you for your thoughtful and considerate response. However, I must take issue with a very basic tenet that undergirds your position: the idea that there is a "Ukrainian people".
To the extent that there are people living in the geographic territory that is Ukraine. and that those people are suffering, I share your concerns.
But to assert that there is such a thing as "the Ukrainian people" as being a discrete and independent sociological cohort is, I believe, incorrect and indeed dangerous.
What we call "Ukraine" has always been a borderlands area separating Russia from Europe. Zelensky himself is a native Russian speaker and actually had to learn Ukrainian once he was elected.
To the extent that there is such a thing as a "Ukrainian" they would be confined to that small part of Western Ukraine that is known as Galicia - and even then, it would be disputed by Poland, who thinks they have historic rights over that territory.
Eastern Ukraine has always been Russian. They speak Russian and worship in the Orthodox Church. The Western Ukrainians are Catholic, and perceive the Eastern Ukrainians as Russian interlopers who must be PURGED.
If you read the documents of the CIA, this schism has always been well known, and to the spooks at Langley offered a way to foment trouble for the Soviets by encouraging an East-West civil war in the UkSSR.
Indeed, the Soviets had fought a bitter war to subjugate the Western part of Ukraine when they first took over the territory. The Western Ukrainians had sided with Hitler and even formed their own Waffen SS Division ("Galizien") and killed Russians at Stalingrad.
The Soviets, under Khrushchev, defeated the Western Ukrainian Nazis, who then fled to North America rather than submit to Soviet rule. Indeed, Chrystia Freeland, Deputy PM of Canada, is the descendant of a famous Ukrainian Nazi.
Putin is often quoted as saying that the collapse of the USSR was one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of all time. But this was not because he liked the USSR - in fact, Putin was and is an anti-Communist. It was because the collapse of the Soviet Union left 10's of millions of Russians stranded in what were now "foreign" countries.
Principal among them was Ukraine.
During the 75 year reign of the USSR, generations of Russians had moved to Ukraine to work in the energy industry, the mining industry, the nuclear weapons and aerospace industry, etc. - because that was what the Communist "command economy" had decided that Ukraine was good for. Some Soviet Socialist Republics made shoes, some made light bulbs, some made clothes, and so on. And if you were a Russian who was specialised in a certain industry or trade, you went to that SSR that had jobs for people like you.
The poor sods probably never conceived of a time when they might be suddenly stranded in a country that was not their own.
And GD the West for exploiting this tragedy in the case of Ukraine - cynically and malevolently - just to hurt Russia.
This cynical manipulation has now reached its zenith in a "proxy war" in which the USA and its vassal allies will fight Russia "to the last Ukrainian".
And that is truly a tragedy.
