What kind of mediation would work? Doesn’t the Russian government just want to take control of Ukraine? If it’s “just” demilitarized (not puppet leader put in place) then the pro Russian separatists governments could seize power on the whole country.

I would get that the Russian speakers region could need independence if the central government discriminates them. But Russia doesn’t need to invade the whole country for this.

Thanks for the resources.

I fail to understand the actual treat to Russia from NATO. Because even if all bordering countries would join NATO. There is no way Russia will ever get attacked. It’s has the 1st or 2nd largest nuclear arsenal in the world. There is no way a neighbor would attack Russia. A neighbor is even more easy to bomb than the USA. Even with much less nuclear power, the level of deterrence would be well enough to fear nothing from a military standpoint.

So a preventive war for this makes no sense. The Russian government can still claim otherwise to have an excuse to start this war.

Even if Ukraine would have been more successfully manipulated by the western governments than the Russian one. A preventive war still makes no sense. It’s not like the Russian government care for the Ukrainian people having a right of self-determination and would want to help them do so.

Furthermore, have you considered that the west has been interfering and manipulating Ukrainian politics which culminated in a coup against the democratically elected government in 2014?

How much has that weighted and how much the pre-2014 government was legitimate. I’m open to the possibility that yes, the country governance could have been stolen from the people by the west. But also it’s totally makes sense to have a wide willingness to join the EU for economic reasons. And to have a willingness to join NATO after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Both would be completely legitimate.

The Russian government has been trying to manipulate Ukraine very strongly also so it’s difficult to tell if the governments wanting join the west was illegitimate.

I think it should be okay, there might some open dataset and otherwise they are big struture that mappers can see well IRL and would want to map. And it’s easy to see on aerial imagery when wanting to map them.

Note that this depends on the completeness of OpenStreetmap data.