Are the French going to destroy their country and kill most of their people for Ukraine? The English? Germans? Anyone in Europe?

I can assure you that we in the US aren't going to commit global suicide over Ukraine.

Remember that we were all set to sign off on using UK/American missiles to hit targets in Russia. Then Putin said he'd view that as an attack by the UK/America and would use nukes. We immediately backtracked and said our policy wouldn't be changing (Biden seemed particularly unhappy about the announcement).

If you know about the whole no-nonsense, "strong leader" mentality in that region, this wouldn't be a mystery. Putin making fake red lines would severely damage him politically. Look at Ukraine. He said he'd invade if they tried joining NATO. We claimed they were and Putin invaded even though it has cost his country a fortune.

Funny thing about deterrence conversations in the west is that it’s so often characterized as a one way street. That the west can be deterred limitlessly and that others like Russia are impervious to deterrence. As if Putin were some fearless automaton with complete confidence. Because if anything spells confidence it’s having 4 out of 5 of your latest in service ICBM tests fail, including the most recent. Just how confident is Putin, having personally fostered such an endemically corrupt society, in his recently manufactured pits? Russia’s pursuit of a nuclear powered drone that would attempt to be a weapon of mass destruction by virtue of creating an irradiated tsunami reveals an intense fear of the credibility of their current deterrence.

The french are actually trying to drag the rest of EU into war because they lost their colonies to russia.

That's a caricature. These countries haven't been colonies for decades, and Russia's efforts to gain influence in these places isn't "colonial" either.

It's something else - a new game with different rules. You can decry/condemn it this influence-jockeying all want, but if you can't get past 19th/20th century idioms and imagery about how the world operates, you'll never get anywhere in your analysis.

Ah yes, it's "territories" nowadays. It's completely the same besides the name!

No, they're called "countries" actually. I highly doubt you'd get very far with this "territory" label if you were to bring it up in a discussion with anyone actually from these places.

Wait you're unaware that france has territories???? Please do some reading before doing the lecturing, it might be more pleasant for everyone involved.

I guess you're also completely unaware of the shenanigans they pull to avoid giving independence.

Mais bien sur, but they aren't the places Russia has been trying to gain influence in.

I'm not lecturing about anything, and it seems you're jumping to a whole bunch of unwarranted conclusions here.