You call me naive, alright, but then pivot and expect us to believe that you can use "billions" to restore his military. I don't think you understand this aspect, this isn't
Command and Conquer: Red Alert where you just buy a few more units and march off in a new direction. A generation of trained leaders and officers are gone, obliterated. This harkens back to a midlevel parallel of the Purges of the 1930s in Stalinist Russia, look what happened when they remobilized (just like you think is so easy) and got destroyed en masse by the Fins and then Germans in '41. And your idea that they can just whip up new equipment is ridiculous on face value, their armament industry is decimated by the sanctions.
Armor production has halted.
They are crowdsourcing supplies for their airforce. Oh, they can beat Ukraine to death on the land, and believe me, they will, but against any western NATO article5 nation, I mean, what planet do you inhabit?
Justice? This isn't some world where there is a God that distributes equal justice under the law and keeps tab of cosmic karma. Putin's an animal, but he'll ravage Ukraine the longer this goes on.
Would a dead Ukrainian solder rather have died defending Kiev and stopping the war or died so that their family in Kharkiv can get thrown out of their homes, starved on the road for a month, raped and then murdered and buried in a mass grave? I want an answer.
The Hitler comparisons are overly simplistic, but unlike you I realize I don't know you so refuse to call you "naive" as you did me. The stability–instability paradox and minimal deterrence policy looms large here, this dynamic didn't exist during the 1930s. Russia has few people it can go after now that NATO expansion into Scandinavia is likely. The Baltic is Article5 and there is tremendous research demonstrating the stability of nuclear power on nuclear power conflict and lack thereof, even conventionally.
But let's think that what you said was smart and valid and game it out historically, counter-factually. Historically, Germany took the Sudetenland as they claimed it was filled with ethnic Germans that were being persecuted and the Munich Agreements between the European powers sought to find peace in 1938. Nice parallel. Let's now diverge and say that when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Czechs got pushed back to a fraction of their size in Slovokia and their major cities were being met by German armored spearheads. But, the Czech's we backed up by the Western nations and Russians and given huge sums of arms and money and aim and amazingly, miraculously, they fought even harder that historically (and I'm Czech, so no offense to the Czech's) they pushed them back to the Munich Agreement lines of '38. The war stalemated and the death toll rose precipitously.
Western Intelligence suggested the Germans would regain the momentum. Meanwhile, Germany was an industrial power and it's removal caused huge disruptions to the world economy, inflation and food supply (exaggeration, but need the parallel). Hitler's army was destroyed as an effective force, the officer corps that we now infamously know -- Guderian, Manstein, von Kleist, Rommel, etc... some dead, other's in disarray. The Luftwaffe begging for parts and unable to fly. The armor and trucks and infrastructure of the army totally fucked and
world wide sanctions preventing rebuilding at scale.
So, now, you're telling me that even in your magical situation where we know Hitler was still a fucking madman asshole the likes of which the world rarely encounters, you couldn't have seen the European powers reach out and call for a ceasefire and end to the death at the Munich boundaries and saying let's demilitarilze the Sudetenland as an independent buffer? You'd basically be saying fight on, retake it all at any cost.
Only in our timeline, the separatist lands were basically autonomous for almost a decade, not 1 year.
Edit and Restated: What are your end goals? What do you hope to see achieved? Why do you want OTHER PEOPLE to fight and die?
