Russia is finding a lot more effective resistance to it's invasion of Ukraine than it was prepared for. It took te years for Afghanistan to motivate them to go home. With heavier and more well enforced sanctions they might well be forced to reconsider Ukraine seriously sooner. Considering that Russia has basically pulled the same crap in half of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia etc, we need to have a plan to put an end to it as well as we can.
That looks to add up to retaining sanctions even if they vacate Ukraine. But we should keep the sanctions in place and every bit as tight until Russia hands over the perpetrators of this crime, including Putin and the generals.
They must pay reparations for the damage and destroy their arsenal of nukes. If and when they have to leave Ukraine with their tail between their legs, they will be leaving a lot of hardware in Ukraine and may well be fiscally and militarily very diminished. They do not have the industrial capacity to rebuild quickly at all.
Maintaining very heavy sanctions may well provide an opportunity to rid the planet of a almost all the nukes, and to find out precisely what they did with their bioweapons. We do know for certain that in the case of weaponized smallpox for instance that they manufactured it by the tanker truck load. They agreed to get rid of it, but they never accounted for that destruction.
After listening to Putin's BS pre Ukraine invasion no one should ever consider anyone in the Russian government truthful about anything. We just may have a whole lot of options that can be exercised if we do it with some decent thought in the whole process.
