I've thought about it, and donated my own money to Ukraine. My fiancee has as well. We have close friends who are Ukrainian.

There are many things that are important; equal rights for all Americans, ending slavery in America, increasing healthcare access, reducing rent-seeking in all its forms, equal rights outside of America. The implication is that I'm a hypocrite if I don't volunteer to be a foot soldier in any one of a hundred important things, but doing so is mutually exclusive. And that's only for the selfless items. What about being a parent? Should one not advocate for Ukraine if they're not willing to orphan their child, or take them with them to a war zone?

Russia is an illiberal coalition of mafias engaging in a never-ending power grab. The limit behavior of such a system is that technological innovation will never be allowed to thrive as it will always fall to violent entrepreneurship, and that the most successful violent entrepreneur will always ensure that no other elements gain enough wealth and power to threaten the power of the current leader. What Russia is follows from what Russia's culture does, and its modus operandi results in destitution and war.

I don't like that, and feel that for everyone's good, Russia's modus operandi should not expand.

Now. Russia has a problem. It has 1.8 times the area of the US and less than half the population. They're surrounded by flat, dry areas where it sucks to live, but you can roll a Panzer division right through. The upshot is that they've been invaded 50-something times in their history because they can't defend it. Because Russia is intrinsically handicapped when it comes to technological innovation and population, they don't have a road network, they have a rail network, which means that its attempts at defending its territory will be in the form of fixed defenses, and those fixed defenses have to be placed at bottlenecks on the far side of the flat areas (far side relative to their wheat belt).

There are nine of these bottlenecks: The Polish Gap on the far side of Belarus, The Baltic Sea through Lithuania and Latvia, the Bessarabian Gap on the far side of Ukraine/Romania, the Black Sea through Crimea, the east and west sides of the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, the Central Asian Corridor through Uzbekistan, the Tien Shan-Atlay Shan Gap, and the White Sea.

The Soviet Union controlled all nine, and after they broke up, Russia went to controlling only one. Putin has been systematically attempting to control the remaining eight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Kazakh_unrest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Nagorno-Karabakh_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...

Ukraine is not in one of these gateways, it's on the way to two. Putin won't stop even after he controls all of Ukraine.

To make things even more dangerous, not only has their technology not kept up, but their logistics are also terrible, and we learned quickly from their first convoy into Ukraine that they can no longer effectively fight a war against a modern opponent, which means that when they trigger NATO article 5, they'll be soundly beaten, which for obvious reasons they will regard as an existential threat, and nuclear weapons will not just be their last resort, they will be their only resort.

So to avoid this, I support Ukraine receiving any and all material support that anyone in the world wants to give them. A resounding defeat in Ukraine stands a chance of dealing such a political blow to Putin as to unseat him from power, and hopefully avoid such an eventuality.

So. Russia culture bad. Nukes bad. Help Ukraine.

Addendum. The username of the person to whom I am replying is 'cudgy', and they appear to be a Russian apologist.