Use your words if you're so smart.

🙈🙊🙉

I guess my view is that countries shouldn’t be invaded.

The issue is, how do you decide which country is legitimate?

Ukraine's current government came about because of the Euromaidan uprising, where a bunch of armed men stormed government buildings in the capital in the west, and declared a new, pro-Western government. Not everyone in the country agreed with this direction, particularly some people in the east, but when those people tried to vote against this new direction, the parties they supported were banned. Then, a bunch of armed men stormed government buildings in the east, declared a new government, a new country, and when the central government tried to subdue them, they requested Russian aid and voted to become part of Russia.

You will no doubt tell me that the votes in the east were rigged, that the armed men in the east were nothing but Russian proxies with no popular support, but that the armed men in the west were totally legitimate, and you'll downplay, justify, or ignore the fact that they banned opposition parties to ensure they won their elections. The pro-Russian side will tell me that the armed men in the west were just Western proxies, and they will cite a leaked phone call where Victoria Nuland handpicked which figures would emerge on top, and they will downplay any concerns about the rebels in the east being Russian proxies.

From where I'm standing, it seems very reasonable to treat both of your claims with equal skepticism. Both groups of armed men have some degree of domestic support and some degree of foreign backing, and I have little evidence or basis to determine the exact proportions. Maybe they're both primarily proxies, maybe they're both primarily genuine, but saying that one's a proxy and the other's genuine is just biased.

For the government in the west to have the right to govern the east, for it to have the right to defend itself and maintain territorial integrity, then it has to be worth defending. Which, at the very least, means that it needs to be democratic. And if it refused to let the matter of which power to trade with be decided democratically, if the people in the east were denied any peaceful approach within the system to advance their views, then I don't see how Ukraine's government could really be called "democratic," or how it could be said that Ukrainians are "making their own democratic decisions."

Genuine democracy in Ukraine is likely impossible at this point. Ideally, the conflict would be resolved through a referendum in the disputed territories, but I don't think there's any neutral party who could oversee that which both sides would trust and accept the results. So, they're just going to keep killing each other, and since they both suck and can't be convinced to stop, my position is to just stay out of it.

Even if the US could afford to keep getting involved in all these conflicts, which it absolutely can't (we just got out of a 20 year occupation and are $40 trillion in debt), my assessment has always been that Americans will eventually just get bored and move on, at which point Ukraine will have little chance anyway. It would've been better to cut the losses from the start and save lives. Now, Russia controls the region anyway, it's a stalemate, and prolonging it is just throwing more lives into a meat grinder.

Even if your narrative was not one-sided, even if the situation was as black-and-white as you claim, I see no point in fighting if I can't envision a path to victory. It would hardly be the first time in history that the "good guys" took an L. And if we allow conditions to decline at home while materially supporting this war effort, there's a good chance the right will take advantage of that and gain power, and that's a much bigger concern to me than some minerals on the other side of the planet.