First of all I'm sorry about your friend. This whole thing really sucks and the only winner seems to be the US military-industrial complex (and other US investo

First of all I'm sorry about your friend. This whole thing really sucks and the only winner seems to be the US military-industrial complex (and other US investors buying up Ukraine at a discount). There was no reason why it had to happen and could have been avoided. That was what the Minsk agreements were attempting. At least on paper and by some parties. I just assumed it was common knowledge about the Minsk ruse. Quick search for "Merkel admits Minsk agreements buying time" returns a large amount of sources for me (using kagi.com), first one: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html Poroshenko's admission was earlier last year. There are also many Russians who have now, after seeing Ukrainians as their brethren pre-war, grown to despise Ukraine and the west overall. Losing jobs due to foreign companies leaving is a temporary blip, they will be replaced by local ones. That's actually what the US is trying to do now, to decrease reliance on foreign production. Any people avoiding the draft by legal means are likely to return (this is something I actually don't know much about, will most be able to return without being persecuted?). And regards to Europe I don't think the worst is over, it's not like things are going back to normal in terms of energy prices any time soon. US LNG for example is a lot more expensive than pipeline gas and Europe might've managed this winter but the increased energy costs will have snowballing effects. Do you think industries won't be massively affected? As for the OSCE events there were double-digit events most days but they increased to triple and some quadruple digits (from my memory, I can find links when on desktop, have the filtered results from that period bookmarked somewhere) in the days before the invasion. And the vast majority of those events were on the Donbass side, indicating an offensive by Kiev (which they had been planning literally for years). US "intelligence" is of course not very honest with pretty much any of this and neither is the western media.