"If there is anything the leadership, that has a stranglehold on on the west at the moment, despises, it is nationalism. It will be a win-win if Putin destroys Ukraine militarily and it remains, at least partially a sovereign state and then the west can move in on what's left and build back better, ensuring all the nationalists are reprogrammed.

I don't think that is the complete hope of the west. They also want a regime change in Russia. Then all there is left in the world to deal with, besides a few small fish, is the CCP."

Yes, that is why I hope Russia won't allow it, and CCP looking at what is going on, along with India, probably don't want to support west and be the next victim. So they will support Russia.

The neocons in US won't stop until they do regime change in Russia and China , but I think its such a big arrogant bite and probably will backfire as it already is with sanctions, only speeding up the decline of the western civilization.

"While the west watches the carnage in Ukraine and sympathizes with it. The politicians don't really give two hoots about it. What needs to happen is to bring it into the fold and if Putin is gone all the better. The new regime in Russia will be put in place and the cultural war of diversity, inclusion and equity can begin there too."

The assumption would be that west puts their own guy instead of Putin , and they tried that with Alexei Navalny and failed. Putin saw it a mile away. But if they force Putin takeover by others in Russia, we should all be warry, since Putin is no where near a hard liner radical as many other politicians in Russia who would go probably to war and get far more brutal than Putin.

"Right now, the west is in a cultural war. So if Ukraine wants to escape from the clutches of Putin and this military war that is decimating the nation they will find themselves in a culturally destructive war. A double whammy when you think that the purpose of the military war was to preserve the cultural identity and firm up its national sovereignty. "

A double whammy indeed. But the cultural identity is a really complicated thing with Ukraine, that really does not have its own cultural identity in the way borders were drawn. And you can't really say it has much of national sovereignty either because westen power set up shop there in the 90's and before that it was Soviet Union. Historically there were many other forces. Current Ukranian borders were unnatural and did not include people who historically or ethnically or culturally represent one peoples,

...........................

The Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (SSRB) was declared by the Bolsheviks on 1 January 1919 following the declaration of independence by the Belarusian Democratic Republic in March 1918. In 1922, the BSSR was one of the four founding members of the Soviet Union, together with the Ukrainian SSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Byelorussia was one of several Soviet republics occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The TSFSR comprised Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, traditionally known as the "Transcaucasian Republics" as they were separated from Russia by the Caucasus Mountains. The TSFSR was one of the four republics to sign the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR establishing the Soviet Union in 1922. The TSFSR was created ostensibly to consolidate the economic situation and Bolshevik control over the region. The TSFSR was dissolved upon the adoption of the 1936 Soviet Constitution and its constituent republics were elevated individually to republics of the Soviet Union.

The Ukrainian SSR was established by the Bolsheviks following the defeat of the Ukrainian People's Republic in the Soviet–Ukrainian War during the Russian Civil War. As a Soviet proto-state, the Ukrainian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations[10] along with the Byelorussian SSR, even though they were legally represented by the All-Union state in its affairs with countries outside of the Soviet Union. Upon the Soviet Union's dissolution, the Ukrainian SSR was transformed into the independent state of Ukraine, although the constitution remained in use until the adoption of the new constitution in June 1996.[11]

Throughout its 72-year history, the republic's borders changed many times, with a significant portion of what is now Western Ukraine being annexed by Soviet forces in 1939 from the Republic of Poland, and the addition of Carpathian Ruthenia from Czechoslovakia in 1945. From its establishment, the eastern city of Kharkov served as the republic's capital. However, the seat of government was subsequently moved in 1934 to the city of Kiev, Ukraine's historic capital, which remained the capital for the rest of the Ukrainian SSR's existence and remained the capital of independent Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Geographically, the Ukrainian SSR was situated in Eastern Europe to the north of the Black Sea, bordered by the Soviet republics of Moldavia, Byelorussia, and Russia. The Ukrainian SSR's border with Czechoslovakia formed the Soviet Union's westernmost border point. According to the 1989 Soviet Census, the republic had a population of 51,706,746 inhabitants, which fell sharply after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

"Ukrainians are the pawn in a tug of war between the west and Russia. The US has thrown billions into Ukraine to try and keep it politically tied to the west. Putin has ruminated about having Ukraine ally itself more with Russia. He took back Crimea and there was little consequence paid from the US or anywhere. other than that was bad, bad, bad and a little finger-waving there wasn't much said about it. I don't think Obama and Hillary wanted people looking too closely at how Putin had secured 20% of American uranium resources."

After 2014 regime change in Ukraine by the US, the next step was to place US military base in Crimea and cut off Russia from the access to the sea and use it as base of operations for further push against russia, and off course Russia could not allow this to happen. Lucky for Russia before something major could happen, in the 2016 Trump and Brexit happened in the west, domestically and those were unexpected black swans, so they kept west busy for a while and in the meantime Russia could arm themselves and rebuild themselves.

Remember in the 2014 after Crimea, the west put sanctions on Russia that hurt Russians far worse than now. Now they were prepared better.

If US didn't do regime change in Ukraine in 2014 and attempted to build base in Crimea, Russia would have not go into Crimea, and now that they tried all the other nasty things in Ukraine, it forced Russia to go in once again, because that is the only option left. Russia is not the agressor here. They are defending. As Putin said, we have no where left to retreat from NATO/US expansion that we all know has only one mission. Turn Russia into what Ukraine is or Middle East is or parts of Latin America are.

"Ukraine sacrificed as cannon fodder by the west"

For sure, like so many countries. Russia would be like Ukraine if it was not for figure like Putin and few lucky black swan events, like unexpected election of Trump and Brexit referendum. This was in 2016, just two years after regime change in Ukraine by the US. Since 2016 until now, it gave Putin and Russia enough time to prepare for resistance to hegemony of the US neocons.

"I think Ukrainians, in general, always resented being a part of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the USSR. Stalin really left a bad taste in their mouths after the Holodomor. Stripping the Kulaks of the ownership of their farms, resulting in a famine that killed somewhere around an estimated 5-7 million Ukrainians. The breakup of the communist alliance in 1991 established Ukraine as a separate and sovereign nation in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994."

This is the anti Russia western project done by the US in the Ukraine. While the facts are not false, the context is false and deliberately so. Soros set up shop in Ukraine in early 1990's after the Soviet Union Fell and he pushed for this anti Russia version. This was than though in schools to, especially western Ukranians and pushed by the government. Many Ukraines in the westn part of the country in particular have grown up as two generations now, thinking this is the truth.

Reality is a bit more complicated. First of all, the present day Ukrainian borders are just something Soviet Union under Lenins vision drew to create artificial borders and use it as extentions of the Russia territory as part of the Soviet Union. They did this with other parts of the territory, Belaruse and "Transcaucasian Republics". plus the satelite states.

This makes many countries in USSR, and in paritcular , not naturally unified country. But one artificially created. Even today, there is a problem of national identity for many in Ukraine.

...................................

About starvation in Ukraine. It was not Russians against Ukranians under Stalin as it is told to Ukranians it was Marxist Leninists under Stalin that required under the regime, the process of collectivization. This was carried out, brutally and ruthless across every country under Marxist Leninist regime.

The Soviet Union introduced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin.

In China under Mao, same thing happened with millions of dead from starvation, it was called Land Reform and Collectivization (1950-1953).

According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional culture of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of an atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.

In "Rebuilding Russia," an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.

The Holodomor

Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to AFL–CIO in Washington, D.C., on 30 June 1975, where he mentioned how the system created by the Bolsheviks in 1917 caused dozens of problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system "in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing 6 million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933." Following this, he stated that "they died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn't even notice it. The world didn't even notice it—6 million people!" Solzhenitsyn opined on 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that the 1930s famine in the Ukraine was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements. He claimed that the "provocatory shriek about a 'genocide' was started in the minds of Ukrainian chauvinists decades later, who are also viciously opposed to 'Moskals.'" The writer cautioned that the genocidal claim has its chances to be accepted by the West due to the general Western ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian history.

Criticism of the West

Once in the United States, Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized the West. In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn said: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"

Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West.

And than after the fall of USSR, the west came to tear apart what was left and exploit it.

So I think it is not correct to blame the Russians for Holodomor, since it was Russians themselves as well as Chinese themselves and off course Ukrainins themselves, all suffered because of same thing. Kommunism and their communist rulers. Russia did not starve Ukraine, Stalin under Communism starved Russia and by extention communist in Ukraine, who were one might say born in Ukraine, following the same logic, starved Ukranians. So did Mao the Chinese straved Chinese people under same collectivism process.

How this way done and that it was not Russia vs Ukraine, but Stalin vs everyone including other communists, can be seen here.