At least a dozen Russian friends are doing business and living in Montenegro and a friend who visited a few weeks ago contrasted once again how welcoming they are to Russian business and Russians as compared to EU members.

There is quite a bit to it, but not in English. I don't expect to convince you.

That's not exactly a fair presentation of the situation. Putin invaded more as a show of force designed to force a fast treaty, which you can see in how intensively Russia was negotiating with Ukraine in February-March 2022. When Russia pulled its troops from around Kiev based on a preliminary agreement, Boris Johnson flew to Kiev and convinced Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian instead. In a fair world, he would be hanged on the Maidan for the needless deaths he caused.

I want to stress: Russia could have held on to the territory around Kiev had it wanted to and the war would have looked very different one year in. Other than the poorly defended areas near Kharkov in Fall 2022, Russia has not been ejected forcibly from any territory in Ukraine that it took in February-March 2022.

You might as well have said, "Senators and Presidents don't have people killed, Michael". NATO is about projecting US power and control. Yugoslavia in 1999 was an attack on the flimsiest of pretexts. Libya was even worse. NATO certainly would be happy to fabricate a "humanitarian crisis" on Russia's borders as a pretext to start dictating terms or precipitating the collapse of Russia as a unified state. This has been the goal of the war party since 1991: repeat the USSR fragmentation again and again until Russia is a series of small states that cannot counter US power.

No, no and no. The US talked about a pivot, but the military industrial complex wanted to sell weapons to countries that can pay, and there just aren't enough countries in Asia that can do that. Japan is hamstrung by its constitution, South Korea makes a lot of its own equipment due to historical circumstances, Taiwan can only buy so much both due to size and also due to the political implications of the sales, and there aren't any other countries worth speaking of.

To the contrary, the US can sell lots and lots of weapons to Europe, especially if Europeans got serious about defense. But how to do that? Oh, I know: let's poke the bear.