Comment by snickerdoodle12

As far as the US is concerned, it's fair game to drone-strike US citizens [0,1,2] from time to time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#Death

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki

The US does not want to go to full scale, open war with Russia.

So the US will downplay or ignore some amount of aggression from Russia to do so.

If the US wanted to go to war with Russia, we would be playing up some rather minor thing, like sending a missile system into "Europe" or something.

When that Ukrainian SAM fell in Poland and killed a farmer, there was a late night emergency meeting between a lot of very important people from NATO countries to decide WTF to do. If the west wanted to fight Russia, that meeting would have resulted in an Article 5 declaration of some sort.

Russia is behind the sabotage/blowing up of a Czech Republic arms depot. If the west wanted to go to war with Russia, that could have also been an instigating event.

Russia will continue to get passes for "minor" acts of war as long as the west does not agree with sending citizens to die in a war.

That we don't equip Ukraine with more than enough war material to do whatever they are capable of, however, is fucking stupid.

Welcome to geopolitics.

As much as I hate to say it: Trump got a point in saying that Europe should have been responsible for its security / military even 10 years back.