Tea and Vitriol

After two years of bloody war that has destroyed a generation of young men on both sides, not including hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilian deaths, the Russo-Ukrainian War is moving inexorably to its close. Russia's Putin will be the victor. It couldn't have been otherwise, despite the delusional optimism of the western democracies, especially in Europe, given their half-assed support for Ukraine. That's because the European Union counted on the United States to pull their chestnuts out of the Ukrainian fire for them, despite the fact that the war in in their own backyard. Russia is the largest state in the world, with vast natural resources and six time the population of the much smaller Ukraine. Ukraine is not a member of NATO nor of the European Union. Russia has numerous alliances between themselves and the successor states of the former Soviet Union, as well as with China and Iran. Neither the United States nor the European Union have protective or defensive al