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Western governments would be quite happy for Russia to be stuck in an Afghanistan type occupation, where they can't get out without losing everything, so they have to stay at massive human and financial cost, until putin gets deposed or however else it ends.
Is there any evidence for this? The west has been extremely comfortable with Putin's Russia for the last couple of decades. Reliance on Russian energy in Europe, gobs of oligarch cash juicing local property markets, political parties etc. Do you really think western governments want the second largest nuclear power, led by a questionably adjusted autocrat bogged down in a bloody war on Europe's doorstep? I'd bet every one of them would take a quick Russian withdrawal to 2014 lines and a staged reversal of sanctions in a hot minute. Betting on regime change happening organically in Russia is a pretty out of the money option, especially without the sort of turbulence that would deleteriously affect western European interests in the short term.
Jung-
I agree. Also, the sanctions and economic warfare will do significant damage to our economies.
I think the truly cynical in government probably accepted the Russian invasion and hoped Putin would quickly and mostly bloodlessly remove the Zelensky government, so we wouldn't actually have to bother with sanctions and they could keep taking donations off their oligarch mates.
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The evidence is that, over the last few years, the US in particular has talked up Russia as the big enemy and military threat, blamed (without much evidence) for interfering in the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum.
Putin is not going to withdraw to 2014. He is keeping Crimea and he needs something else - by which I don't mean territory - to make an orderly withdrawal. If he doesn't get something, he won't leave.
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frank9755
I think that's a really important point. It's also where there is a divergence between the interests of Ukrainian people and western governments. Western governments would be quite happy for Russia to be stuck in an Afghanistan type occupation, where they can't get out without losing everything, so they have to stay at massive human and financial cost, until putin gets deposed or however else it ends. But that is not a good way for Ukrainian people to live for the next decade.
Good outcomes involve negotiation ASAP and Russia withdrawing straight away. I don't know that it matters anything like as much to the average person in Ukraine exactly what the terms of the peace are, as that it comes quickly.
A bad outcome could be Western governments giving Zelensky enough help to enable him to prolong the war indefinitely. In the short term it will make the Russians more violent and destructive (Chechnia). And it makes the hell of war last longer.