"Putin now says his war in Ukraine is a war and one that must be one to rescue Russia from Western efforts to destroy Russia as a country." Right, and Hitler insisted he was "forced" to invade the Soviet Union because "eventually" the Soviet Union would invade Germany. The reality was that Hitler wanted his lebensraum and the Soviet Union was going to supply it. And the reality is that Putin wants to restore, not simply the Soviet Union, but the "Rus" of the tsars, which included Ukraine, most of Poland, the Baltics, etc. Hence Putin's aggressive war on Ukraine.

" This led to the Ukrainian ability to quickly defeat the 2022 Russian invasion..." "stall" would be more appropriate than "defeat". @Frank Natoli " Hitler wanted his lebensraum " While this is correct, the opposite is also true: Stalin was planning the attack on Germany and war-gamed it in 1940. They were birds of a feather.

@voland: IIRC, when Zhukov commanded the German forces in the war games, the "Germans" did extremely well, which of course was ruled out of order. When other Red Army generals commanded the German forces in the war games, with Zhukov on defense, not so much. But gaming is simple prudence, not active planning, and, despite Zhukov showing how well the Germans could do, that was totally ignored by Stalin.

The breakup of Russia sounds good to me.

@Frank Natoli We need to move out of here. TSP does not want to fix the issue. I would much prefer an unofficial group on mewe.com (not FB!). IIRC, there were two games, one with the assault via Belarus/Poland, and the other was through Carpathians, Slovakia/etc. The northern variant made the Russian assault fail because you just can't move fast through the Central European Plains and its swamps. I think Zhukov was paying for Germans in that variant.

@davebarnes You need to look at the map showing the locations of the ICBM silos, and then review the break-up. Some regions can be broken off, most notably Caucasus, but the total break-up?...

Multiple US foreign policy think tanks openly espouse the breakup (aka "decolonization") of Russia. This goes back to Brezhnev's Grand Chessboard to break Russia via Ukraine. Naftali Bennett's video interview (also on Youtube with English subtitles) makes clear the negotiations in the spring were focused on peace and military security for neutrality a-la post-war Austria and that is was the US and UK who killed the deal. But that was a few hundred thousand dead people ago. As for calling a war an "operation," this was borrowed from the US policy of calling all its wars "operations" (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Serbia and other "defensive" operations). I'm in no way a fan of Putin or his policies, but TSP should stick with facts and not blind neocon propaganda. George Washington and the other founders would be absolutely disgusted with what US foreign policy has devolved into.