Mr. Dunn continues with Russian useful idiot bothsides-ism that finds moral symmetry where it's nonexistent:

"Both sides will grow old with regret over the war. Both sides will live with the terrible memories from the war."--The Ukrainians will not regret resisting Russia's genocidal invasion and stubbornly insisting that they exist, a fact which Russia denies.

The Russians will have no terrible memories of their cities flattened by enemy missiles and drones and their energy infrastructure bombed. Dunn's bothsides-ism implies moral symmetry in Ukrainian and Russian memory where there is none.

"Documented evil on the part of Ukraine flows against the narrative."--There is no Russian Mariupol, there are no mass graves of Russian civilians like Izyum, Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol. No Russian theaters with "children" written on the roof and full of children have been bombed. There are no intercepted conversations betwee Ukrainian soldiers' and their wives who told their husbands to rape as many women as possible so they won't have Russian babies.

In the Donbass there was no suppression of the Russian language more than in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, or English in Quebec or Breton and Basque in France.

Who started the secessionist war in the Donbass? Ask the neo-Stalinist Russian nationalist who did:

"Igor Girkin started the war in the Donbas when the conditions for war did not exist there. He bragged in an interview that the people there did not want to fight until he, Strelkov made war unavoidable."

Mr. Dunn's "documented evil by Ukraine" is the Putinist neo-imperial narrative that views Russia as permanent and Ukraine as contingent and negotiable. This denies Ukraine the right to protect its sovereignty against foreign-sponsored secessionists, authoritarian ethno-nationalist ideological brethren of the southern Confederates who started the American Civil War. Presumably Mr. Dunn would not have denied the right of the sovereign American republic to defend itself against southern secessionists. But I may presume too much.

In May 2013 the parliament of Ukraine overwhelmingly approved the association agreement with the EU - 318 votes out of 449 possible. The massive protests in November against Yanukovych's decision to choose the Eurasian Union instead of the EU was not approved by parliament and interference into the internal affairs of Ukraine by Russia - a violation of the Budapest Memorandum Russia signed in 1994 guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity.

Public opinion polls of Crimea in May 2013 showed 53% preference to be an autonomous part of Ukraine, 22% to join with Russia and 20% independence. Crimeans were looking forward to European tourists and had tourism offices in EU cities. The survey can be reviewed here - https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnaec705.pdf

We know that such "documented evil" in Ukraine is non-existent because Mr. Dunn never even tries to document beyond sending me links to Jacques Baud, the Swiss ex-NATO staffer and Russian war crime denier who says Bucha and Irpin didn't happen and that Ukraine provoked the war, which is like blaming the rape victim for provoking the rapist by wearing a short sovereignty skirt and flirting with the richer, stronger guy across town.

"The pull of money": In 1944 the US spent 44% of GDP on the military. $38bn for Ukraine = 1/7 of 1% of GDP. It's not even a rounding error in the Pentagon's budget. The GDP of the 50+ countries supporting Ukraine is more than $70tn ($25.6tn for the US, $31tn for the EU, $5tn for Japan, $1.54tn for Australia, $1.83tn for Canada, $2.45tn for the UK). Wartime aid to Ukraine isn't even a rounding error on their GDP. But simple math isn't part of Russian useful idiots' calculations.

"People should be punished for thinking that anyone other than Putin started the war, right?"--Reality denial should not be cost-free. With a hopeless military defeated in Kharkiv and Kherson, western useful idiots like Mr. Dunn that undermine support for Ukraine are Putin’s last hope. Ignoring Putin's declaring himself the second coming of Peter the Great and his July 2021 screed genocidally denying Ukrainians' existence is pure reality denial that deserves punishment in print. The Russian invasion launched on my birthday, February 24, was the decision of one man and the hubris of him and those around him:

"William J. Burns, the director of the C.I.A., flew to Moscow, sat in a conference room near the Kremlin and waited until the formalities were over before explaining the real reason he had come.

It was early November 2021. The United States believed Mr. Putin was considering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Burns explained. If he proceeded down this path, Mr. Burns warned, the West would respond — decisively, in unison — and the consequences for Russia would be severe.

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Mr. Putin’s security council, stiffened and looked Mr. Burns in the eye, officials in the room said. He abandoned his notes and extolled the prowess of Russia’s armed forces. They had been so thoroughly modernized under Mr. Putin that they now rivaled the United States militarily, he said.

“Patrushev didn’t qualify it,” said John Sullivan, the American ambassador to Russia at the time, who was there. “He was just looking at Burns and saying: ‘We can do this. We’re back.’ The way I would describe it was that this was already decided, and they were supremely confident. His message was, ‘It’s not going to be a problem for us to do what we want to do.’” Mr. Burns briefed Mr. Biden upon his return to Washington, officials said. Mr. Putin had all but made up his mind to take over Ukraine, Mr. Burns told him, and the Russians had absolute confidence victory would come swiftly.

To Mr. Putin, Ukraine is an artificial nation, used by the West to weaken Russia. He describes it as a cradle of Russian culture, a centerpiece of Russian identity that must be wrested back from the West and returned to Russia’s orbit.

In his eyes, that is the biggest unfinished mission of his 22 years in power, people who know him say." (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-putin-war-failures-ukraine.html#hubris)

The correlation between western behavior and Russia's bigoted, contemptuous genocidal neo-imperial narrative about Ukraine's "Little Russian" untermenschen ("kholki" in Russian) is a very simple number: zero, nada, or nichivo in Russian. Imperial contempt for Ukrainians as uncultured muzhiki (peasants) and their language as a primitive peasant dialect predates western involvement by three centuries.

"America is at war with Russia": The entire civilized world that upholds the UN charter is at war with Russia and its shredding of that charter, as lopsided UN General Assembly votes show. Yuval Harari summarizes Putin's ending of what he calls the post-1945 "New Peace" when he:

"chose to end the most peaceful era in human history, and to push humanity toward a new era of war that might be worse than anything we have seen before. Indeed, it might threaten the very survival of our species. This is a tragedy, especially as the past few decades have shown that war isn’t an inevitable force of nature. It is a human choice that varies from place to place and time to time. Since 1945, we have not seen a single case of war between great powers, nor a single case of an internationally recognized state annihilated through foreign conquest."

The world Russia and Putin, with their geopolitical darwinist view of sovereignty, threaten to return us to is the pre-1945 structure of human history:

"Perhaps the most important change in recent decades has been psychological. For thousands of years, peace meant “the temporary absence of war.” For example, in between the three Punic Wars fought by Rome and Carthage were decades of peace, but every Roman and Carthaginian knew that this “Punic Peace” could be shattered at any moment. Politics, economics, and culture were all shaped by constant expectations of war....During the late 20th century and early 21st century, the meaning of the word peace changed. Whereas the Old Peace meant only “the temporary absence of war,” the New Peace came to mean “the implausibility of war.” In many (though not all) regions of the world, countries stopped fearing that their neighbors might invade and annihilate them. Tunisians stopped dreading an Italian invasion"

Since Mr. Dunn wants to follow the money, here are the financial consequences of a Russia victory or frozen conflict that overturns the post-1945 "New Peace". In case you thought the US military-industrial complex costing less than 3.6% of GDP was militaristic and warlike:

"Until recently, the military was the expected No. 1 item on the budget of every empire, sultanate, kingdom, and republic. Governments spent little on health care and education, because most of their resources went to paying soldiers, constructing walls, and building warships. The Roman Empire spent about 50 to 75 percent of its budget on the military; the figure was about 80 percent in the Sung Empire (960–1279); and about 60 percent in the late-17th-century Ottoman Empire. From 1685 to 1813, the share of the military in British government expenditure never fell below 55 percent and averaged 75 percent...."

In the post-1945 liberal international order:

"Countries in all continents benefited from the rise in global trade and investments, and almost all countries enjoyed a peace dividend. Not only could Denmark and Canada shift resources from tanks to teachers—Nigeria and Indonesia did the same."

Mr. Dunn thinks it's the US that's dragging us back to the pre-New Peace order of states spending 44% of GDP on the military, as the US did in 1944. This is Russian disinformational useful idiocy that would make KGD defector Yuri Bezmenov proud.

In his grievance-addled annexation speech Putin ranted that Russia never signed up for the liberal international order when the USSR at the founding of the UN in June 1945 did exactly that. Me talking sense to Mr. Dunn won't impress him, but maybe Yuval Harari might:

"The argument that Putin was pushed unwillingly to invade Ukraine to preempt a Western attack is nonsensical propaganda. Some vague Western threat is not a legitimate excuse for destroying a country, looting its cities, raping and torturing its citizens, and inflicting untold suffering on tens of millions of men, women, and children. Anyone who believes that Putin had no choice should name the country that was preparing to invade Russia in 2022. Do you think the German army was massing to cross the border? Do you imagine that Napoleon got out of his grave to lead the Grande Armée yet again to Moscow, and Putin had no choice but to preempt the imminent French onslaught? And remember that Putin actually first invaded Ukraine back in 2014—not in 2022. Putin prepared his invasion for a long time. He never accepted the breakup of the Russian Empire, and he never saw Ukraine, Georgia, or any of the other post-Soviet republics as legitimate independent nations. Whereas—as noted earlier—average military expenses have been about 6.5 percent of government budgets around the world and 11 percent in the United States, in Russia they have been far higher. We don’t know exactly how much higher, because it is a state secret. But estimates put the figure somewhere in the vicinity of 20 percent, and it may even be more than 30 percent."

(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/putin-russian-ukraine-war-global-peace/672385/)

"The war will end when the West wants it to end": A total inversion of reality. Removing western support for Ukraine would lead to a Rwandan scale genocide, as Russia's leaders and Putin's media mouthpieces have repeatedly said they intend: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/

Somehow Mr. Dunn chooses not to listen when Russia's genocidal empire-builders openly tell him who they are. The moral and military asymmetry is simple: if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine and Ukrainians cease to exist. If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. But this won't happen because a lost war ends Putin's neo-tsarist regime of "l'etat c'est moi". Mr. Dunn need only listen to Putin, Lavrov and Medvedev to know that the peace deal Russia wants ends Ukraine as a state. But Mr. Dunn misrepresents his real position in this article since he omits his prior advocacy that surrender was Ukraine's best option and on February 26 called the war "a manufactured distraction". But his newer articles conveniently omit prior errors.

If you want more nuclear proliferation to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Indonesia, a definitive end to the post-1945 "New Peace" liberal international order and UN Charter, sign up for Russian useful idiots whataboutist appeasement: Here's the deal you'll get, as outlined by Harari:

"If Putin’s gamble succeeds, the result will be the final collapse of the global order and of the New Peace. Autocrats around the world will learn that wars of conquest are again possible, and democracies, too, will be forced to militarize themselves for protection. We’ve already seen Russian aggression prompt countries such as Germany to sharply increase their defense budget overnight, and countries such as Sweden to reinstate conscription. The money that should go to teachers, nurses, and social workers will instead go to tanks, missiles, and cyberweapons. At 18, young people all over the world will do their mandatory military service. The whole world will look like Russia—a country with an oversize army and understaffed hospitals. A new era of war, poverty, and disease will result. Alternatively, if Putin is stopped and punished, the global order won’t be broken by what he did—it will be strengthened."

We tried non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-39. Its results this time, if we tried it, would be identical, though far more costly in a nuclear age.