Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual prize in the conflict is access to the European energy market, economically speaking. It's about Russian pipeline gas vs. US LNG tanker gas, and it's about where the money spent on those fossil fuels will be deposited - London & New York banks, or Moscow? This is why the Saudi war on Yemen has been ignored. The reality is that if Putin had taken the deal offered in 2003 (Exxon buying >50% of Russian oil pr…
If the Mexican army raped and bombed their way across Texas towards California, should we just shrug and point out those lands were taken under historically dubious circumstances and we should let them have the U.S. Southwest?
A lot depends on what the local population wants, I think. The Vietnamese population didn't want to be ruled by a puppet government controlled by France the USA, hence the active armed resistance to the French and US miltary occupation (1950s-1970s). The Afghan population didn't want to be ruled by the Soviet Union, or by the United States, hence the active resistance to Russian control in the 1980s and to American control in the first two decades of this century.
Now, you could say the Americans in Vietnam tried to rape and beat the population into submission to imperial rule, and that the Soviets tried to do that in Afghanistan, and that's called wartime propaganda. The actual goals of both of those occupations were fundamentally economic in nature, but that's a taboo subject (starting a war for economic gain being a Class A War Crime in terms of international legal precedents).
It does seem pretty clear however that the Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian/Crimean population doesn't want to be ruled by Kyiv, doesn't it? So just draw a new border and end the conflict.