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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gabriel Maxwell" data-source="post: 419888" data-attributes="member: 121">Our social justice keyboard warriors — whose “I stand with Ukraine” usually pertains to switching their Facebook avatar to the Ukrainian flag and would never pick up a gun and actually join the fight in Ukraine — normally say that a peace deal should never be made with land concessions to Russia because that would reward Putin and embolden him to later attack the rest of Europe. On the contrary, they say, the war must continue until Russia is beaten militarily and pushed off the Ukrainian territory. The most common argument they use from their comfy Netlix sofas to instantly shut down any further debate about this is reminding people of the 1930s Western attempts to appease Hitler and his promises not to continue his invasions and how he promptly broke his own word and went on a conquering rampage across Europe.Except they conveniently skip over crucial context, both from World War II and today’s frontlines in Ukraine. First, Hitler was able to conquer Poland in just 5 weeks, Warsaw fell even earlier than that. The Netherlands took 5 days, the Czech Republic 1 day and Norway about 6 hours! Until Hitler’s grand failure in Russia, he was able to conquer all his targets with his infamous Blitz Krieg strategy within about 2 months max, most often in mere days or hours.If Putin is incapable of conquering more than 20% of Ukraine after 3 years, how on Earth is he going to conquer the entire Europe going against a combined military of NATO’s 30+ countries? Russia’s military budget is 80 billion, NATO is 1.2 trillion while Russia’s population is 145 million, NATO is 950 million. Second, the front lines in Ukraine were set back in the summer of 2022 when Putin went up from 45,000 km² he initially conquered in 2014 to about 100,000 km². Since that time, for almost 3 years, it’s been mostly a stalemate with a minor change in Russia’s favor in 2024 when they went up to about 110,000 km² (out of Ukraine’s 600,000 km²) which they were able to get at a great cost in terms of lives and military equipment. Ukraine is heavily dependent on Western military aid. They would’ve fallen a long time ago without it. And yet despite the support of the Biden administration and the rest of NATO, not only have they not been able to push out the Russians, it appears a prolonged war may only end up costing them more territory. The Russians are obviously exposed to nothing but Putin’s propaganda. But how much better is the West doing? I’ve been hearing for 3 years how these latest sanctions are really going to cripple Russia. Or how they only have enough money for a few more weeks of war. Or how Putin is terminally ill and dying of cancer or Parkinson’s. Look at his hand shaking! Meanwhile, according to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), the EU paid approximately €140 billion for Russian fossil fuels between February 2022 and February 2023. In comparison, by March 2025, the EU’s financial and military aid to Ukraine totaled around €132 billion. Talk about empty virtue signaling! The war is costing both sides in the conflict tens of thousands of lives each year (and that’s on top of the many more injured) and the EU and the US taxpayers at least $4.5 million per hour (and that’s on top of humanitarian and financial aid) to the total tune of about $250 billion and counting.What is a prolonged war supposed to achieve based on what we’ve seen over the past 3 years except continuing stalemate on the front lines, additional tens of thousands of lives lost for nothing, and more billions upon billions of taxpayers’ money redirected to the military industry?I’m also not happy about Ukraine being unable to win the war (though I’d never particularly cared for that ridiculously corrupt and often racist & homophobic country and would certainly never go to fight for it) or Russia being a nuclear superpower which can always resort to suicide and global apocalypse if pushed too far? But if you’re going to be pragmatic about peace, you have to acknowledge reality.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?