The situation is closer to 1914 than 1939. And I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that the escalation that led to the first world was a colossal mistake

I vehemently disagree.

1914 saw large imperialist empires on both sides. There were no real "good guys" in that war, as both sides were looking to either keep and consolidate power over colonial empires (the Entente) or break up the colonial empires to get some for themselves (the Germans and Austrians).

1939 saw an ambitious despot attack democracies to brutally subjugate them. That is also what we are seeing now.

It literally started with the Austrian empire invading semi recently independant Serbia for bullshit reasons. Yes I guess we can see how russia is evil now. And when we look back at ww1 we think that the situation Was much more ambiguous with tons factors and motivations from all sides. but that's hindsight! if you go back to 100 years ago that was exactly how the french or the russians were justifying the war. "The evil Austrians were trying to subjugate our slav brothers and we need to save them". The Austrians will probably not stop at serbia, and take over the balkan. Yet, we can still see that saving the Serbs was not worth the carnage of the great war.

My point here isn't that russia will be proven right in the future. Its that war always sounds like a good solution, or even the only solution to avoid something worse. But we have to avoid getting into that same cycle over and over again, Especially when we are in a nuclear world.

By the way, the comparison with 1939 Germany is completely spurious imo. Germany did not attack Poland because it was a democracy, had already purged it's own Jewish population, had started gassing the disabled and mentally ill, had already eaten 2 medium-sized countries in a year, was in an offensive pact with italy, openly planned to engage in ethnic cleansing...

If you think that is comparable to the current situation then all nuance has been lost and all wars are comparable to ww2. That ww2 was morally unambiguous makes it very convenient to use and project ourselves as the equivalent of the allies in 1939 and call for military action while the opposite is true for the first war. But the comparison is still baseless beyond the war rhetoric

The realpolitik of the modern world is that you can't mess too much with any nuclear nation, no matter how much it sucks. All you can do is get your own nukes and make the red lines very clear, and cut off trading and diplomatic ties to the extent it won't be treated as a declaration of war. Unfortunately, the decision of x vs. total nuclear annihilation is very heavily weighed towards x, no matter what that x may be.

I'm starting to feel that our sense of morality is not well adapted to a world where a despot can end civilization with the push of a button.

It's not quite like that though. In Ukraine Putin's already lost 466 tanks, 95 planes, 5 generals, a few thousand troops depending on how you define that one and so on. And that's in three weeks - not sure how long they can keep it up. Also the west seems to be increasing support a bit - I think there are better surface to air missiles and switchblades on the way.

We may be a week or two from "culmination point" when the strength of the Ukrainian forces exceeds that of the Russian ones.

And then those other countries are NATO and attacking them would be quite a different kettle of fish. Those truck convoys probably would have been smoking ruins within a day if NATO air forces had had a go.

You are high on twitter propaganda. Loses are meaningless to Putin as long as objectives are completed. Mariupol is done, surrounded and in ruins. Messages showed up suggesting Russians started sending people to gulags/concentration camps https://twitter.com/timesobs1/status/1505258913398235145

My country is next on the list together with other Baltic nations. This current inaction is identical to start of WW2 with everyone paranoid about their own nose and "unnecessary escalation". We have maybe 2-3 weeks to sent troops into UKR before its too late. If we dont help Ukraine its a sign NATO wont intervene beyond sending arms and "stay strong" prayers when our time comes. Another Yalta is on the table, after all why should we risk Nuclear war if Putin gives us a word he will stop at German border, right? :(