For all it's worth (and I hope it's a lot) I heard a psychic say a couple of years ago that Russia would wind up saving us in some way. As dictatorial as Putin is, he's not a stupid man. And he doesn't strike me as someone who wants nuclear war -- if only because he's still on the planet himself. And he likes animals.
60+ years ago, the Joint Chiefs asked JFK to greenlight a nuclear holocaust on the Soviet Union (which clearly wouldn't have benefited anybody, but the generals were convinced -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that while the USSR would suffer a quarter-billion deaths, a retaliatory strike would "only" kill 40 million Americans.... So, we "win").
Disgusted, JFK said "no".
But at that time, we had rational men like Kennedy and Khruschev in power -- and they both paid the ultimate price for it, the trigger-happy hawks destroying both of them.
Today, there seems to be nobody in any authority willing to pay the price for ceasing a nuclear apocalypse.
Except, perhaps ironically, Vladimir Putin. So, it's kind of up to him. No one over here seems interested in navigating this deadly mess sensibly. And Ukraine, obviously, is in the middle and helpless.