So Russia's genocidal invasion of Ukraine, including mass deportations, mass torture in filtration camps of POWs, NGO and political leaders, Holodomor starvation export through attacks on grain export siloes and ports, systematic looting of art museums and treasures is self-defense?

So, you define as "self-defense" Putin's proclamation that Tsar Peter was a "gatherer of the lands" and "restorer" of lands that were Russian?

""Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned (what was Russia's)," Putin said after a visiting an exhibition dedicated to the tsar."

In televised comments on day 106 of his war in Ukraine, he compared Peter's campaign with the task facing Russia today."

"Apparently, it also fell to us to return (what is Russia's) and strengthen (the country). And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."

These include Finland, Poland, Alaska and the Baltics. This would, of course, shrink to nothing the distance between Putin and his dead court clown Zhirinovsky, who called the Baltics "those dacha countries".

Russia, Muscovy's 500 year old empire expansion tool, has no more inherent right to rule over non-Russian peoples than the Ottomans did the Balkans, Italy over Libya and Ethiopia and Eritrea, France over Indochina and Algeria, the Dutch over Indonesia, Belgium over Rwanda and Congo, Britain over America, Kenya and Tanzania, the USA over the Philippines, the Germans over Namibia, the Swedes over Norway and Finland.....

Peace, as opposed to frozen conflict armistice and truce a la Transnistria, Bosnia, Abkhazian Georgia, is a political settlement in which the aggressor is rendered incapable of and uninterested in empire, as the end of WWII did to Germany, Japan and Italy. Peace without Russia divorcing empire is inconceivable. Peace without Russia divorcing its "viable means of self-defense" from empire is inconceivable. I do not wish to eviscerate Russia, but Russian empire in the same way that the 20th century's era of empire demolition eviscerated all the empires listed above. You seem unable to differentiate eviscerating Russia from eviscerating Russia's capacity to wage imperial war. They are not the same thing.

Only when we eviscerate the latter will we have true peace--the Clausewitzian political outcome of Ukraine's war aims.