Invoking Yogi Berra's "Prediction is hard, especially about the future" is true, but generically non-explanatory.
"wishful thinking...wishing ill upon Russia": More analysis-free psychologizing about me in place of history and fact-based analysis. The Russian people can have empire, or be free, but not both. I wish for them the only way out of oppressive kleptocracy: the empire demolition and dissolution that has made the Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Japanese, Turks, Brits, French, Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese much happier and more prosperous.
So, on the contrary, I wish them well. So does my Russian-Latvian wife, Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former Russian MP now in the Ukrainian army and the 400000 Russians who have fled Russia.
"both sides get high from the game": This symmetry is non-existent. The war is happening on only one side's territory, with war mass killings and torture of civilians happening only in Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum and Kupyansk, not Moscow, St Petersburg, Rostov and Belgorod. Suggesting that both sides
"get high off the game" implies moral symmetry between victim and victimizer. Ukrainians are fighting for survival against a genocidal enemy, not "getting high off the game".
"powerful men playing chicken": This echoes the "don't fight the imperialist war" slogan of the CPUSA in 1939-6/22/1941, as wrong now as it was then.
It's Putin's war + that of the Siloviki whose wealth depends on Putin. The oligarchs who were already wealthy beforehand have lost big time. On the Ukrainian side there's total wartime mobilization with 700000 men and women already under arms fighting for survival against a genocidal enemy, not just "powerful men playing chicken". Again, this phrase is empty sloganeering, unsupported by evidence on the Ukrainian side. If you read Anne Applebaum's Atlantic profile of my former student who organized the VKS (Ukrainian Vollunteer Service), you'll see how war has made Ukraine more democratic, with a more engaged civil society. I subscribed to the VKS' patreon and you should too. https://www.ned.org/ukrainian-volunteer-service-connects-activists-across-ukraine/
