The End Game

 Both Yves Smith and MoonOfAlabama have good thought pieces on how the War in Ukraine will end.

(The one by Yves is truly excellent, read that if nothing else.  The (highly moderated) comments are unusually excellent too.)

MoA quotes Yves' ending line:

In other words, the way to an end game is regime change. And the weak regimes are all in the West.

 The commenters on Yves' piece give lots and lots of historical context I'd never learned before.

Things like the history of Norway, Sweden, and Finland up to and including World War II.

And commenter Sibiriak quoted from a Kremlin spokesman who said this (debunking the widely claimed notion that Putin is attempting to resurrect the Soviet Union or even take over Europe):

VLADIVOSTOK (Sputnik) – Moscow has no issues with Finland or Sweden and hopes that they will not deploy missiles directed towards Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

Russia has no issues with either Sweden or Finland related to the security area, related to territories, the official said, adding that “these countries are not waging a civil war against their regions, these countries are not killing Russians on their territory, these countries are not banning the Russian language as the language of outcasts.”

To which another commenter hk replied:

The catch is that Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are coming increasingly close to doing what Peskov describes (in fact doing some of these things already)….. Of course, he didn’t mention these countries in that statement.