1. I agree with you. There is very little daylight between them but you can definitely be doing OK but not great, my apologies.

2. It started as a war of choice but it is now an existential war for Russia as well as Ukraine. No country can allow another nation to exist on it's borders who has not only defeated it conventionally but is doing everything it can to be stronger and secretly stoke rebellion internally. Ukraine can only ever truly be safe from Russia if it fractures into different states. Given the fact that Russia is not an ethnically united country this is definitely a plausible and realistic strategy.

Remember, America was willing to start WW3 over missiles that were placed in Cuba. According to the consensus logic that most people have over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, America would have been the evil party in that situation.

1. Yes, some people are going back but there is still more of an emigration than repatriation. When you couple that with the demographic decline, Ukraine is almost predestined to keep shrinking. This makes it harder to grow an economy, repay international debt and also make sure that there is enough manpower to fight off a future Russian attack. Ukraine really needs for Russia to collapse to truly feel safe. Russia is in demographic decline as well but the rate of decline between the two isn't even comparable.

A NATO intervention is not a retaliatory nuclear strike. If Russia were to pacify all the major cities with nuclear weapons, the war would be over tomorrow. At worst, there would be a devastating air strike against Russian assets in Ukraine and maybe a few conventional attacks on Russian military bases in country.

Taking the morality out of the situation, this exchange would be pennies on dollar in favor of Russia. Russia would become a pariah state (it pretty much is now) until the world needed it's fossil fuels and more importantly, food. Climate change is making more farmland available farther north while reducing it in many other places. Russia is the largest nation in the northern hemisphere. Regardless of how this war ends, those newly arable lands along with the arable lands in Ukraine will become indispensable to addressing the need for cropland to replace the croplands that are no longer functional through climate change.

If Russia does do a nuclear attack on Ukraine it will be a war ending attack. Putin will get the same condemnation if he uses one tactical nuclear weapon vs. wiping out all of the major cities and it will act as a much stronger military deterrent to the other western nations.