Real life is not a series of choices between good and bad - it is a series of choices between bad and worse.

We had the chance to open the EU and NATO towards the Russian in the 00s, even when the Russian came crawling to the Berlin Bundestag and suggested to draw a path towards this direction and were rejected hardly.

We had the chance for a compromise, e.g. through the Normandy format when ALL relevant parties agreed more or less except the Americans.

This all does not make the invasion right, but it is not as one-sided as the propaganda is showing it here right now. And this is why agree with your statement that real life is not not as simple as "good" and "bad", it is all just bad - on all sides.

And just another anecdote. As we are originally from Ukraine, I went down to the border with friends, money and cars and helped people at the border to make the right decisions. We mainly focussed on people withough language skills, old people and people with very very very little money. I had the chance to speak to hundreds of Ukranians crossing the border to the EU. 90% DO NOT CARE who "rules" them. They have their dreams, hopes, they have their apartments, their jobs, their pets, friends, homes... they just want this war to be over - even if Putin "wins".

When watching Western news and reports I dont see those opinions represented in the same way I experienced them when talking to people. I see stories about values and democracy and other philosophical stuff - and when they show Ukranians then it is not those who I have met.

Where is the opinion of the normal folks that I have met: the war should end asap, no matter who wins. Instead I feel spoon-fed that we HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE for $VALUES. And then you speak to people who have absolutly NO CLUE and NO RELATION to either Ukraine or even Russia and they are so opinionated and SOOOO SURE about the things that must be done and the price that has to be paid.

I feel very frustrated and I stopped telling people about my experience at the border or here when volunteering and ACTUALLY speaking to the REAL people.

One part of me agrees with this. War is the worst (as far as i know from books and tv).

The other part of me thinks: That is how Germany expanded half a century ago, getting resources for ww2. (thug perceives the pacifist as a weakling and an easy opportunity to profit). Ukraine has a lot of natural resources, part of the reason for the war.

One of my theories it happened the way it did is that the US at that time was far weaker and spent from the Cold War than it let on. That it was fiscally more of a close a call as WW2 prevailing fiscal standards were, and the US simply did not have it within itself to financially support another rebuilding like it did with Germany and Japan. The US possibly also expected that if Russia integrated with Europe, the US would underwrite most of the check, the NATO alliance would absorb the benefits, dissolve, turn around and economically compete with the US after the US just exhausted itself from the extended effort.

Please ELI5 because I'm not following your anecdote. For your "90%" figure to make sense to me, you'd have to be able to draw the line connecting the dots that explains how 10% of the Ukrainian population can coerce however many remain in Ukraine to join that 10% and put up sufficiently organized resistance to stall Russian forces. The widespread expectation at the beginning was that too few Ukrainians would put up a fight (your "90%") and it was time to cede all of Ukraine like Crimea was ceded and move on.

How do we get from that expectation to the reality on the ground where the titular second most powerful military in the world was supposed to steamroller through Kyiv in a few days but is now bogged down in a conflict it now admits to its own citizens might be a long slog, on only 10% popular support of Ukrainians? I find it more plausible that 90% of those at the border might have this attitude, but that is still a minority fraction of the total population remaining in the country. Perhaps 90% of those fleeing are predisposed to just wanting it to all be over no matter who rules them?

And why would these people trust Putin's word that he wouldn't implement a modern Holodomor if they just let him have Ukraine, even as he's shipping grain away from Ukraine by the metric thousand-ton right now? And what would they feel if the rest of the world turned their backs on Ukraine in such a scenario because 90% "just want this war to be over - even if Putin 'wins'" and Ukraine is definitely a part of the Russian Federation instead of a currently-recognized sovereign state, and strategic nuclear weapons are instantly in play in that scenario to wrest control of Ukraine-the-Russian-Federation-territory from Russia?

Once Ukraine is under a vengeful narcissist's thumb with the other thumb on the nuclear trigger, just what exactly do you think will happen, Slavic brotherhood rainbows and unicorns? If that 90% ever existed in reality at all, then it lost its chance at any kind of "just want this war to be over" in the first week or two.