alt Hacker News> Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
> The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
Imagine if the British had responded this way to the invasion of Poland in WW2.
Worse: which side of the border is Auschwitz located?
> It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.
Ukraine had nukes, gave them up. Was probably sensible at the time, but the observed behaviour is now "having nukes means you don't get invaded, giving them up means you do". Russia invading at all is pushing nations more in the direction of getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia.
(Also, but entirely separately, Trump's USA sabre-rattling over Canada, Greenland, war with Iran, and disengagement from previous allies everywhere, is pushing nations the same way but to deter the USA(!) or China).
« Imagine if the British had responded this way to the invasion of Poland in WW2. » – What exactly was the British “response” when the Soviet Union invaded “Eastern Poland” on Sep 17, 1939? And what was their “response” when confronted with reports of Polish atrocities against Germans in “Western/Northern Poland” during the August crisis?
« getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia » – Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects, and to draw a line; not “democratically” on women and children as the US did, of course (in truth the US used a kind of napalm, poison gas, pumpkin bombs, flash bombs, and coloured smoke bombs, see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer). “Nukes” are just an elaborate deception created from 1945 through the 1950s, basically in maintenance mode ever since.