Best outcome in Ukraine would be if their military would lay down their arms and surrender. Otherwise, you have a Syria-type civil war that destroys the country with terrible casualties.
The Russian military has surrounded all the major cities, and has encircled the large contingent of the Ukrainian army that had amassed to attack Donetsk, but were beaten to the punch by the Russian invasion. This large mass of Ukrainian soldiers, estimated at 45-65k, faces annihilation. (Keep in mind Russia has tactical nuclear weapons that can take out an entire army with a single device — “tactical” in that these are much smaller nuclear weapons designed to take out a large contingency of soldiers all at once. If you are the leadership in the Russian military, do you engage this Ukrainian force near Donetsk with your own army and therefore sustain serious Russian casualties, or do simply annihilate it with this single device and therefore forego any Russian casualties? The temptation to use such a tactical nuclear device would be very compelling. That would be 45-65k soldiers gone or horrendously wounded in an instant.)
No way that Russia is not going to take back Ukraine from the clutches of NATO, as they see an unaligned Ukraine — without American missiles — as critical to the security of Russia. And, unfortunately, the Russian emphasis on “denazification” does represent reality — the current Ukrainian government is controlled by mobster-like thugs who took control after the 2014 coup. (Was that coup engineered by our CIA? It was reported at the time there were rooftop snipers who were shooting people on both sides of the street demonstrations to foment the situation. Were these snipers funded by our CIA?)
American military aid to support this corrupt government in Ukraine is making this best outcome less likely and an extended devastating civil war more likely. The ones who will suffer will be the Ukrainian people for no purpose.
As usual, thoughtless American foreign policy makes a mess of everything it touches.
Henry's Views 