Russia fights for domestic political reasons.

Wha-ha-ha? I live in Russia, I promise you nobody will demand continuation if they say on TV that Putin got assfucked by Ukrainians and we lost. I also don’t notice anybody speaking about that war much. If by domestic political reasons you mean that independent and well-existing Ukraine is a threat to the regime - then surely. Except not anymore, after what’s already happened it will take a lot of time to rebuild.

Ukrainians fight to avoid annihilation.

No, annihilation is what’s happening in Latakia, done by a former branch of ISIS which is suddenly good and accepted for the West, done in their “Syrian army” uniforms, and their commanders record videos with speeches like “do whatever you want, just don’t record it”, but there already are plenty of videos with empty streets with corpses of civilians lying around, people executed in all manners possible, families murdered together, and all such shit which I avoid since 2 days ago.

Ukrainians fight to avoid something that almost every people on the globe has experienced, they would of course have former servicemen and especially officers jailed and possibly killed, politicians, activists, whoever not, but that’s not the same as genocide.

Next for your tangent, that’s a gold medal performance in metal gymnastics to get where you got.

This sentence looks like an attempt at irony, except it’s just stupid.

First, we’re talking geopolitics here. There is no single “good” side and no single “evil” side. All sides will do things judged by others as evil. Second, to suggest russia is virtuous even by itself, is insultingly silly.

You have to pick one. Also there are good and evil deeds, of course you’ll get the impression there’s no such if you listen to what people say.

And compared to the rest of course Russia is virtuous, at some point (being a kid) my opinion of all those sides was that some are evil, but competent and thus make consistent things which eventually combine into something good, while Russia is both evil and incompetent, thus just shitting around. I no longer think so. I prefer incompetent Russia. Except nobody should rely upon it for security.

Because right now it’s still spending enormous resources at trying to defeat its strongest former ally, while the rest of its former allies are somewhere between battered and dead.

My whole theory is that maybe Russian leadership has learned something, had some internal changes, so that now they may be looking for an opening to stop the war and start rebuilding the rest of what they failed to keep operational.