As a fifth year of conflict begins, Russian president Putin's limited military operation is expanding into a general conflict between Europe and Russia. The EU has raised apparently from loans from banks approximately $100 billion to enable Ukraine to continue the conflict while Europe builds up it's military capability to directly enter the war with Russia. This statement is not merely my opinion. It is the stated policy of the German chancellor, the British prime minister, and the French president.

From the beginning of Putin's limited military operation in Donbas, I have described it as folly that would prolong the conflict until it ever-widened into a general war. It seems that now Russia's foreign minister has come to agree with me.

The conflict should have been a very quickly settled affair. Russia should have cut all rail and sea routes into Ukraine, thus preventing the transfer of Western weapons. The government in Kyiv should have been attacked, and the entire electric supply in Ukraine shut down. With Ukrainian government disrupted and the inability of Ukraine to move troops and weapons, the conflict would have quickly been over.

But Putin was not prepared. Perhaps influenced by his pro-western central bank director that Russia could not afford much of a military, instead of preparing for the inevitable conflict, Putin placed his faith in the so-called Minsk agreement, which the German chancellor and the French president said was used by the West to deceive Russia. Thus in February 2022 when Putin faced the invasion of the two breakaway republics known as Donbas by a 600,000 Ukrainian army trained and equipped by the West, his only option was to protect the Russia citizens in Donbas from the Ukrainian army as Putin had left Russia unprepared.

The conflict consistently widened as the west took advantage of the opportunity that Putin's hesitation extended to them to continually widen the conflict. Weapon system after weapon system that the West said would never be sent to the Ukrainians were sent. The Russian strategic bombing force was attacked. Today Russian life far inside the country is disrupted by Ukrainian drone attacks aided and abetted  by the West. Citizens are killed and energy facilities damaged. Putin's hopes to end the conflict through negotiations have come to nothing. President Trump has yet to sit down with Putin, evaluate whether the United States can accept Putin's conditions for ending the root cause of the conflict, and, if not, attempting to arrive at some compromise.