> OTOH I am very impressed with how Volodymir Zelenski turned out. Who would have thought?

He played his cards so well that Ukraine now has 100k dead people, another 300k injured, so much destroyed infrastructure and so many cities turned into battlegrounds. Yes, "impressive".

I am not saying he's to "blame" for this, but being "very impressed" is weird to me as well — whether it was possible to play the fine line between sovereignty and compromise I don't know, but I can certainly see less costly middle ground.

What would have impressed me was to have gotten Ukraine into EU, yet committed not to join the NATO and figured out a "neutral combat zone" for Eastern Ukraine — keep both Ukraine people and Russia happy, for instance.

So do what Russia didn’t want them to do and give Russia less than they wanted and they would be like “okay, cool. We won’t invade you then”?

That solution flies in the face of the real world reality.