> Since it excludes Russia from the day one I also care very little, and for me that's a liability not a virtue.

There is nothing in the key treaties of the EU excluding Russian membership, provided that it meets the criteria, of which the rule of law and the respect for human rights are the largest concerns. Back when Gorbachev was seeking "Common European Home" with the EEC, European countries were quite open to the idea. Certainly no less than they were open to a good working relationship with Germany only five years after their citizens had been saved from concentration camps. In Central and Eastern Europe, everyone who set European integration as their goal reached it in 10-15 years, and it has been an incredible success for everyone involved.

But I believe we once already discussed that feeling of empowerment from being able to kill people across the world with impunity is more attractive to you than fishing quotas and other mundane things that the EU deals with most of the time to improve the lives of its citizens day by day.

> Again, that's only your opinion with which I disagree. There's Crimea and LPR/DPR and Ukraine has started a civil war against LPR/DPR.

There was no civil war in Ukraine. LPR/DPR are fiction created by Russia to mask their invasion. And this is not my opinion, but facts established by the European Court of Human Rights. A few years ago they had a case brought against Russia by countries whose citizens perished in the shot-down MH17 airliner. Russian representatives tried to spin the old lies about "separatists" in Ukraine being at fault (and thus absolving Russia of all responsibility), but the court found no facts to support that there had been any separatism worth mentioning in Ukraine. Those people were, from the start, like Girkin from Russian secret services, recruits from local criminal gangs working for them, or from the armed forces of Russia without proper insignia, all acting under Russian military command.

Pay attention to the reverse side of the Russian campaign medal awarded to the participants of the invasion of Crimea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_%22For_the_Return_of_Cri... The start of the campaign is incribed as 20 February 2014. That was months before LNR/DNR "declared independence", and even predates Yanukovych running away from the country (the event gopniks call "CIA coup" that started it all).

The truth is that Russia invaded Crimea as Ukraine was in internal turmoil, and then made special operatives cosplay separatists in Donbas and used that as an excuse to invade Eastern Ukraine.

> They should go to Putin and sign some ceasefire or peace treaty with him if they don't like it.

All offers Putin has made so far can be summed up as "let me keep what I've stolen, and add a bit more". Anything less than a retreat from Ukraine is not a serious proposal. You are paying one Afghan war worth of killed every month for the stubborness to admit in the third year of the war that the three-day land grab has failed. The price is only going to rise as European arms factories ramp up production, and more of the fighting is carried over into Russia as restrictions on weapons get looser. The batch of fighter jets that the Netherlands signed over to Ukraine yesterday came without restrictions about their use over the skies of Russia.

> Why come to me. I am not Putin and I didn't even vote for him.

People like you are the reason why Putin has any impact in the world. Putin is not sitting behind a bench in a factory and milling artillery shells that reduce Ukrainian cities to rubble as if a nuclear weapon had gone off. He is not programming Ukrainian power plants into missile guidance systems to make Ukrainian cities unlivable. He is not the one sitting in a jet and dropping bombs on Ukraine. He is not the one torturing minors in cells fitted for children. He is not the one raping, murdering and stealing across Ukraine. Without millions of people acting as his willing executioners, he would be a rambling maniac without any influence on the world.

By choosing to adopt his bunker mentality and spread his lies, you have a part in this too.

Circling back to the beginning, you may disagree with everything, but the way Russians treat Ukrainians in words and actions alike shapes how you will be treated in return. By the way things are going, you will have many more opportunities to complain about humiliations.