Genocidal conquest is a feature, not a bug, of Russian empire building. Of course, Russia is far from unique in this. For Russians, Ukrainians are Malinki Russkiy kholki and muzhiki. They medicalize Ukrainian identity as a mental disease, just as the Nazis medicalized the racial inferiority their ideology ascribed to Jews, Slavs, Blacks and Gypsies. They perceive Ukrainian identity as identity theft because it nullifies Russia's foundation mythology about the conversion of the Viking warlord Voldemar (Vladimir) in 988 and Russia Orthodoxy as the Third Rome instead of the Slavo-Turkic hybrid empire it really is. To avoid looking in history's mirror and seeing what's really there, Russia must succeed in branding Ukrainian identity as produced by a conspiracy of the satanist West, globalist foreigners, NATO, Jews, Poles, gays, trans....add more at will.

Since Russia's entire media and leadership has genocidally declared Ukraine to not exist, there's nothing to negotiate with an invader whose leader is an indicted war criminal. "Russia has 1000 years of institutional knowledge of war" --Why Mr. Dunn keeps writing that Russia has existed and been fighting wars for…

If he prays at the altar of the Russian ethnonationalist empire, he deserves to be as disrupted as much as Potemkin's bones in Kherson recently were. If he understands, as Kasparov and Khodorkovsky do, that Russians' empire addiction is a fatal disease, be more forgiving.

When you buy a house in the US, the EU, Norway or Switzerland you know from the land book that you can trust that the purported owner who's selling actually owns it. In Venezuela, Cameroon and Algeria, not so much. Read Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital about the history of property rights. Why you're defending the property rights of Afghanistan's Taliban and Russian oligarchs' stolen fortunes is beyond my comprehension.