Strictly enforced reparations and sanctions to rebuild Ukraine are the functional substitute for the post-1945 occupations of Germany and Japan after their Stunde Null (Zero Hour) defeat. Whether such sticks can achieve as much as institution building American carrots like American-drafted Japan's constitution, the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, is doubtful. But since Russia is occupation-proof, there's no alternative to reparations + war crimes trials and full de-Putinization/Stalinization or remain in North Korean-style quarantine with an enforced oil and gas price cap enforced with global secondary sanctions on non-compliant countries.

China, which loves the idea of a hobbled Russian vassal state on its border, is the West's unintentional ally in pursuit of this goal. So do all the -Stans, Russia's former colonies in Central Asia. Kazakhstan is switching out of Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, a leading indicator of Russian soft-power demolition and decolonization.

The key is to understand the full range of policy tools to enforce Russia's deimperialization, including using every tool short of direct intervention so a defeated Russia allows Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, a de-Kadyrovified Chechnya, Dagestan the heavily Ukrainian Far East, Karelia, Yakutia and other commodity-rich republics to secede from the grossly misnamed Russian "Federation".

We must understand that Russian history teaches us that the window of opportunity while the Siloviki-oligarch coalition is sundered and they're on the back foot will be brief. It's geopolitical carpe diem before the revanchist ethno-nationalist imperialist I'll Be Back Terminator returns for reassembly and vengeance, as it will surely try to do. It's unlikely that the Axis of Prudence, unlike our post-1945 Wise Men who built the postwar Bretton Woods, UN, NATO and Marshall Plan international order, are formulating policy with such long term history-minded goals in mind.