It's - LONG PAST TIME - the U S of A Acknowledged Its Own Inglorious Role In Baiting the Russian Bear: Its Unashamed and Quite Simply Shameless and Shameful Post(Cold)-War Triumphalism - Indulging Self-Righteous Self-Exaltation and Smug Gloating Over the Ex-USSR Post-the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Implosion of the Soviet Union - Has Yielded Its Baleful Fruit of Long-Simmering Resentment On the Part of the Russian People and Leadership...And, I'm Sorry to Say, the Fault Has Not Been With the Latter...

Though it doesn't justify the Russians - aka Vladimir Putin - amassing troops upon Ukraine's border: far from it (indeed, their ongoing effective war of attrition against Ukrainians begun back in 2014, far as I can discern, hasn't ever actually ceased, though admittedly news reports from the Crimea and the Ukraine generally these days are extremely sketchy at the best of times - and as that deep and profound thinker Smeagol-Gollum well put things "These aren't decent times!")...

Nevertheless 'the West' (as in the United States of America) has long since wrong-footed the entire situation (by which I refer to its aforementioned post-Cold War triumphalism, in particular its unwarranted and prideful attitude and posture) and has thus in a large measure contributed to things deteriorating to their present-day state.

But expect a long-overdue apology on the part of the Yanks? - you better forget it!

Being ever and only in the right means, as one songster so (un)aptly put matters, never having to say you're sorry...

But only in the mind and heart of an arrogant believer in the Cold War era maxim that might ever makes right, and victory calls for a sense of smug self-satisfaction and gloating...

...rather than a much more appropriate sense of modest self-abasement and gratitude.

Having long since chosen the latter course, whatever the relative rights and wrongs of the military actions of the current Russian regime, America's trajectory is sadly ever onward, as secular observers have long since noted, from (long since becoming) the self-anointed global cop...and ultimately into an inglorious outworking of the Scriptural depiction of Revelation's false prophet speaking like a dragon and enforcing the sign, the mark, of the first sea-beast's authority...

And believe you me, the end-game will not be pretty, not one wee bit, I can readily assure you!