Because my mother was born there I'm an Irish citizen as well as a US citizen.As a result I suspect that I follow events in Europe a bit more closely than do some in this country...including some here at FR.There seems to be many,many people in the West who believe that the USSR is dead and buried and that Vlad Putin is just a regular guy.IMO that attitude is breathtakingly naive.
Putin is most certainly NOT a regular guy.
But poking the bear in the eye with nothing to back it up is a very bad idea. If Putin is willing to fight to keep Ukraine out of the EU, or to partition Ukraine, or to repossess the Donbas and the Crimea, there’s no military force on earth willing or able to oppose him.
That being the case, posting crap like “the people of America (Europe, world, etc, etc) are standing with the Ukrainians” is arrogant nonsense. We are standing with them the same way we stood with the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechs in 1968, which is to say, not at all. And the lie that we are “standing with them” (whatever that means) may encourage some poor fools to get themselves killed for nothing.
My grand-uncle was promoted to First Lieutenant in time to deploy to the Mexican Punitive Campaign in 1915 (sounds GOOD, don’t it?). Northern Mexico is our “near abroad”, and when we were a healthy country, we kicked ass there any time it suited us.
What Putin does in his “near abroad” is nothing but trouble for us. We have no power to influence events there, and we should stop pretending we do.
And the only other nation with armed forces of any size and ability that COULD intervene has burned all their maps showing the roads into Ukraine, and for very good reasons.