It's starting to look really messy. Like you say, Ukraine is in a civil war and this will only make it much worse. The Russians can't back out, or their side gets massacred and the West smells blood, but has no long term vision, other than Putin bad man. It might go to world war, but it's definitely going to be a total monkey wrench thrown in Europe, as it pulls on all their thousand year old divisions. People might be clever individually, but the more involved, the lower the common denominators.

Putin is like the Russian Taliban. A native immune response to the depredations of the global economic hit men, that are the modern colonialists.

My take on the larger reality;

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-cliffs-edge-2b382ae2a73