Why Putin Will Never Give Up Kyiv, with or without a Trump-Brokered Deal

Reminds me of the Serbian insistence that Kosovo must eternally belong to Serbia because a battleground in Pristina had been a birthplace of Serbian identity, despite the fact that the huge majority of residents of the area were Albanian--and that had been the case for over a century. (with a lot of back and forth between various ethnic and religious groups over the centuries before that)

And while I don't doubt that some Russians actually believe they're brother peoples with Ukrainians, I doubt Putin does. To be blunt about the matter, bombing the snot out of Ukrainian hospitals, elementary schools, apartment buildings, daycare centers, and the like is an odd way of showing brotherhood--never mind being a nasty series of war crimes. It's a pattern that is very familiar to Moldovans in "Transnistria", Belarussians, Georgians, Armenians, Chechens, and Syrians, and transitively to those attacked by Russia's client state of Iran through surrogates in Gaza (Hamas), Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen (Houthis), and the like.