Despite my deep cynicism, I am essentially an optimist. I tend to see opportunities for end games that result in humanity walking away from any kind of final solution. And sometimes that means having to look beyond the boundary conditions of the current conflict and see it in the grander context of what humanity is trying to achieve.

So remember, this is my bias. There's a solution even if things look bleak because humanity has always recoiled from the worst of its excesses when personally confronted with them, at least for a few generations until the memories fade.

In WWII the nominal good guys, the Allies, defeated the nominal bad guys, the Axis, but mainly the Nazis. I'm not one to subscribe to that caricature of events. I know the issues are far deeper than that.

During war both sides' propaganda becomes the height of reductionist. The other side is bad.

Putin, for his part, is calling Ukrainians both brothers of Russia and Nazis at the same time, overplaying the genocide of Russians in the Donbass. While in the US we're just calling the Russians by names we would normally reserve for ants invading our kitchen.