Western "leaders" seem incapable of grasping the degree to which a great many ordinary Russians have been completely conditioned by Kremlin propaganda - which is surprising, because we have plenty of examples of the same phenomenon in the West. 80% of US Republican voters believe the last presidential election was "stolen" and of course we have the 13+ million morons who voted for Brexit merely because they were given two mindless soundbites to chant. What this means is that a mere defeat of Russia in Ukraine will only lead to the kind of stab-in-the-back fantasy that Germans created after WWI, which enabled Hitler so easily to trigger WWII just a couple of decades later. If we don't want to see Russian forces desperately invading other European nations in the next decade or so, we need to ensure Russia's military and all the many proxies are utterly destroyed. This will result in Russia itself fragmenting into several smaller states, each ruled by a thuggish warlord focused on asset-stripping as much as possible for him and his family, thus ensuring that no meaningful threat will again be posed to Europe for several generations, if ever.

Anything short of this outcome will merely result in a larger, more horrific, and entirely unnecessary war within a decade.