While there's a lull in the fighting, congratulations to everyone who correctly predicted a Russian Invasion before this thread came to the fore: gold stars for everyone. Please badger anyone who made an incorrect guess. As we all know, if one be wrong about geopolitics in Eastern Europe, one is wrong about everything else.
What is the goal of the West, now that the Russia has launched an invasion?
First, nobody in Western governments cared about Ukraine yesterday. Nobody cares today. The Western powers want Russia to become bogged down in a long war of attrition a la Afghanistan. Russia's demographics are in decline; she cannot replace her losses. Should enough gopniks be gutted by old Ukrainian fishwives, Poland, Finland and the Baltic States will have a fighting chance in the next Northern war, which (take out your betting slips) is coming.
Ukraine will lose this war decisively despite the frothing media coverage. That's the point - the weapons being sent now by the West are intended to be used during a guerrilla campaign.
Because the Americans have decided they do not want to be world police, there is now a geopolitical vacuum. Countries such as Russia are waking up and acting like real countries again. Hence, the most consequential thing to come out of this war will not be anything related to Ukraine itself, but rather German rearmament. Soon, Germany will act like Germany. France is already acting like France, etc. The Franco-Germany alliance will break because they have very different interests in very different spheres. In the long term, Germany and Russia will reorder Eastern Europe according to their own interests, as they have done every other time. This war, I suspect, is a last hurrah for a united NATO.
Some final rambling points: the people who hated you yesterday, hate you today. Remember Media companies have been struggling because their output of Soviet-style black propaganda and distilled fatuity is no longer a money maker. Yet, wars are popular and real STALKER is going to sell as much as video game STALKER. The oversell is desperation.
That the cathedral have been wrong about everything and are infected by semi-calvinist cultistishness does not change how evil this invasion is. Ukrainian nationhood, for better or worse, is being birthed from this war. I do not like digging holes and I am not willing to die in a Ruthenian ditch. The appropriate response, I think, to the decision of choosing between the evil of Tsarist revanchanism, on the one hand, and the evil of woke gnosticism, on the other, is to feed one's chickens or raise fish in your bathtub - I don't know, I am retarded.