It's like the trenches of WWI combined with the forever wars the US fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congratulations Russia, you've saddled yourself with a decades long conflict potentially and lost the geopolitical purpose of invading Ukraine within months since Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership.

Truly the only trustworthy source

He denounced specific parts of the attack. The section of international law that explicitly allows violent resistance to a military occupation or blockade doesn't exempt the resistors from the rest of international law. The IDF/Israel and Hamas have the same obligations under international law(s).

Lies! I went outside and I saw a poster about CLIMATE CHANGE, and then I turned the corner and heard a family complaining about minimum wage being too low! So unfair, I just want to be ignorant of other people's suffering.

Ukraine escalated by violating the ceasefire.

Which one(s)? There were so many from 2014 onwards that I lost track. I'm always skeptical anytime one side gets all the blame for violating a ceasefire.

If Russia wanted to ensure the safety of the people of Donbas (which is a big if tbf), what should they have done differently, at any point leading up to the conflict?

If it really is about the people of Donbas and not annexing the land itself, they could have done what every country is supposed to do when the safety of people in a region is jeopardized – open their borders to refugees and asylum seekers. It would piss off Ukraine, but they could have just been like "Come across the border and we'll set you up with a Russian passport".

Did I read the same article as everyone else? I don't get where "failed offensive" is coming from. It was western media that created the impression of an impending counter-offensive that would all but end the war, not anything from Ukraine's armed forces as far as I know.

Since launching a much-vaunted counteroffensive using many billions of dollars of Western military equipment, Ukraine has recaptured more than a dozen villages but has yet to penetrate Russia's main defences," .... NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN that Ukrainian commanders deserved the benefit of the doubt. 'Ukrainians have exceeded expectations again and again," he said. "We need to trust them. We advise, we help, we support. But... it is the Ukrainians that have to make those decisions."

This doesn't sound like a "failed" offensive to me. The "much-vaunted" part came from the West, not Ukraine. It sounds to me like western officials got themselves psyched up based on nothing and are now whining about it. So like, yeah, critics of the slow counteroffensive, shut up. You sound as ridiculous as the people who acted like Kyiv would be taken by March 2022.

If your goal is to prevent deaths, surrendering would have been the ideal yeah.

This has literally never been true in any war ever. Foreign occupations rarely tend to be bloodless and I doubt a Russian one would have been an exception. At no point were any of the peace talks about Ukraine's surrender – only renouncing it's NATO ambitions in exchange for the withdrawal of Russian troops, as per:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/06/boris-johnson-pressured-zelenskyy-ditch-peace-talks-russia-ukrainian-paper

"In the weeks ahead of Johnson's April 9 visit, high-level diplomatic talks held in Belarus and Turkey had failed to yield a diplomatic breakthrough, though reports in mid-March indicated that Russian and Ukrainian delegations "made significant progress" toward a 15-point peace deal that would involve Ukraine renouncing its NATO ambitions in exchange for the withdrawal of Moscow's troops."

At no point was surrender on the table - that would have likely lead to Zelenksy's detention and execution in the early days of the invasion.

And that makes it okay for them to escalate it, how?

Yes, but the liberal pro-EU protestors got sidelined by literal neo-Nazis. The following President was basically handpicked by the US Ambassador. There's plenty of western media from 2015-2021 about the integration of Azov into the Ukrainian military structure, the rehabilitation of World War II collaborators, and the suppression of the Russian language. The people of the East are, in principle, just as entitled to wish to join Russia as western Ukraine is to join the EU.

Until Democratic centrists sacrifice trans people to pass various "must pass" bills after House GOP reps put poison-pill regulations into them and try to make a new Hyde Amendment, prohibiting Federal support for gender-affirming care and opening the door to outright legal discrimination federally.

And that's assuming they don't lose the Senate/Presidency.

There's a state-by-state map updated last in June here: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/june-anti-trans-legislative-risk

Being a sovereign nation is when you don't have a seat in the UN and most sovereign nations refuse to recognize you as an independent nation.

I really don't think this is the view people on the left should hold. Someone could say the same thing about many nations or groups that don't have a seat in the UN and aren't recognised but are still supported by communists and anarchists.