- Ukraine-Sure with the great decisions by our leadership we lost more of our population and land than was even discussed and agreed to at the beginning during negotiations, but take comfort in knowing that we saved Galapagos islands, we realize that this hypothetical cannot possibly be checked, so population just needs to trust us when we say if we haven't thrown tens? hundreds? of thousands of our soldiers at this, Orcs would've taken over Lviv and Galapagos islands would be next! Hooray to great decisions!
Or :
Sure with the great decisions by our leadership, we still exist as a country, closer to the west with hope of joining EU and eventually NATO, and don't have to live in a Kleptocracy.
The whole "they should have just let Putin win" is such a stupid argument.
Sure, technically such logic could still be used to explain not following Minsk agreements even if Russia takes Kyiv and capital moves to Zakarpattia. Should hold in all cases unless leadership is completely dismantled, then it's back to we were protecting NATO with out lives. I guess that's where negotiations come in all sides will need a way to sell this as a victory for their people.
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Or maybe Ukrainians just don't want to be in or with Russia, just like nearly all countries in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet block.
You can yell "cookies" all you want but anyone following politics in the aforementioned countries for the last 30 years could see that these countries had all sorts of issues, pendulum swings left and right, pro- and anti-EU/US/NATO etc, but most still somehow ended up on the western side of the newly-being-erected iron curtain, with exceptions being authoritarian shitholes like Belarus and the like.
There are many good reasons for this, all vividly illustrated now in Ukraine. Who could have know that people might not like to be invaded and ruled by a KGB psychopath. But wait, no, it must be some evil US plot. Maybe Clinton installed Putin back in 1999 and is puppeting him into doing all these evil things.
Just need to oppress other continents/countries to channel the cookies to the "right" places to keep up their standard of living, what idiot wouldn't want to be on the cookie receiving side?!?! To rip the benefit you just need to make sure to be born in the right place closer to the demarcation line. I'm sure your set commitments won't let you agree to that, so let's try to relate to Crimea, surely you'd agree that lots of money was channeled to that region to make it more "appealing" most likely at a cost of other regions. That's how geopolitics work, and the benefit of hegemony is the ability to do that on a much larger scale, bigger cookies with bigger oppression. If Ukraine is to be split you can be sure that both sides of Ukraine will benefit generously from both world powers and receive creme de la creme at cost of others.