If that's not enough, then perhaps Russia could also censor internet access to hide information that it doesn't like about Ukraine.
How is this enforced?
It seems a prerequisite for that would be an agreement on “what is Ukraine and what is Russia”, which is something of a topic of violent disagreement at the moment.
The primary concern that I and many others have is that things will not go to plan. If the American public does not start paying attention to what's going on, it is possible that the conflict there will escalate to a hot war that will engulf all of eastern Europe. If the West manages to win to the point of overpowering the Russians, they are likely to use nuclear weapons to rescue the situation. The likely response from the United States at that point will be to pull the plug on the entire war effort because the alternative then will be global thermonuclear ominicide. The result of this path is a total restructuring of Europe on an economic, political and military level. (Needless to say, this is not a desired outcome for comfortable elites who stand to lose a great deal from changes they have not anticipated.)
Please don't downvote me; I am not a propagandist for any side. I am merely concerned about very real and immediate risks that the media is failing to report. I might be wrong, but the least you can do is to hear out an alternative view.
The long distances are a geographical barrier of their own. If there is one lesson to take from this war it is that offensives are successful when they travel a limited distance and then stop to consolidate their gains, regroup, and build supply lines.
Even if you left nuclear weapons out of it, a successful attack on Moscow would not be a Blitzkreig to take Moscow the way the Russians hoped to take Kiev but would take years of biting off a little piece and then biting off the next piece while the Russians are able to resupply their defenses through their best-in-class military rail logistics system. The Russians would fight with the same passion Ukrainians are fighting with now (and have international support from China, Iran, probably India and other countries) and you'd have to have a large number of screws loose to even think about it.
You can't say that the US made Russia attack Ukraine in order to deter the Chinese from taking Taiwan. On the other hand, the Chinese have seen the disaster it would be to attempt to take Taiwan and lose.
Conventional weapons have an element of deterrence just like nuclear weapons. The F-22 has been in the arsenal since 1995 and hasn't shot at anything in anger until it shot down a freaking balloon last month. For years we've speculated about how the S-300 missile system derivatives would do if they were tested and we can still only speculate how they would do against the latest western kit.
Certainly Russia handed the US a great opportunity to demonstrate its military superiority. At the cost of no blood and little treasure (it costs much less than $100 billion to give Ukraine $100 billion worth of weapons that are already paid for; ammunition and many components have an expiration date and could have gone unused otherwise) the US gets to win the next 20 years of possible battles through intimidation... This is the "fighting without fighting" that Bruce Lee talked about.
Most critics of US foreign policy have pointed out that it frequently supports authoritarian regimes of the worst kind. If neoliberalism has been bad for workers in the core it is not because of free trade between the UK and France, Italy and Ireland, it has been the consequences of opening trade to the authoritarian Chinese regime. There is certainly no consistent pattern of forcing democracy down people's throats with any success.
A Russian puppet state in Ukraine would've given Russia an "early" warning of about a week. Would they be able to muster a defense in a week? Of course not. Would they be able to conventionally defend against NATO? Of course not. That's why their doctrine has been "any conventional invasion against Russia will be answered with nuclear weapons", and that's a great deterrent. That nobody actually wants to invade Russia is the cherry on top of the "if you invade, the world ends" threat.
The Russian invasion certainly surely has plenty of reasons, but "we're afraid of NATO" is all the way down the list. Much higher will be: domestic politics, fertile grounds for farming, natural resources to exploit, increasing the size of the population you can steal from, and likely also a generous amount of "I'm old, I want to be remembered as the man who returned Russia to former USSR-glory".
Also, if an invasion is so easy, why didn't they finish after a year?
The most obvious answers would be escalating their existing invasions of Georgia or Moldova the same way they escalated a pre-existing invasion of Ukraine. But its hard to see either of those while they are still bogged down in Ukraine, and anything beyond that is only even remotely credible if the Ukraine and Western resolve collapse.
One part of nuclear deterrence is standing up to bullies and making clear the lines. This includes escalation points leaving flexibility for conventional warfare. Remember that US and Russian pilots fought over Korea and Vietname, and that there are multiple cases of supplying other side.
The US has done good job of not escalating because supplying Ukraine has worked well. Russia knows that using nuclear weapons or attacking NATO bases will provoke response, probably aerial attacks inside Ukraine. It is unlikely to escalate beyond that and Ukraine doesn’t need ground help. Attacking inside Russia is too risky. Russia or NATO will never be invaded.
Invading a country that was getting NATO membership kicked down the road in a way which convinced both NATO and Western-leaning non-NATO countries that the Russian threat and need for a strong alliance was much greater than had previously been understood seems likely that it will turn out, in retrospect, to have done exactly the opposite of the first part, and doesn’t seem likely to help with the second, either.
But, in any case, I think you are wrong and making the mistake of doing nation-as-person analysis when the real reason for the war are much more person-as-person than nation-as-person. This was about quick, easy win to shore show Putin’s virility, in much the same way as the 2014 invasion of Crimea was; the difference is that in this case, Putin had had smoke blown up his ass by both Russian and Russia-friendly Ukrainian sources, who had painted him a picture (perhaps because they thought its what he wanted to hear, perhaps because of their own agendas, probably a mix of both) that the situation was much more ripe for it than it was, and the higher the cost, the less room there is for an exit short of total victory (beyond even the unrealistic goals that were the initial plan) without an appearance of catastrophic weakness. The war isn’t about what Russia needs strategically, its about what Putin needs personally.
> For the United States, this conflict is about sticking to a long-held neoliberal/neoconservative plan to replace all governments with Western-style democracies.
No, its not (and that’s just neoconservative, not neoliberal, anyhow: neoliberalism is an international economic ideology which is concerned with how nations trade and, rather pointedly – and a key way it was distinguished from the more general sense of liberalism at the time the term was popularized – unconcerned with the structure of their governments beyond their participation in markets.)
> If the American public does not start paying attention to what’s going on, it is possible that the conflict there will escalate to a hot war that will engulf all of eastern Europe.
It is a hot war involving several countries around Russia, it has been for well over a decade; arresting it before it expands or winning it should it expand is the NATO objective, and the eastern flank members of NATO have been the most aggressive about it because they are most threatened by expansion. Failing to recognize that is a sign that certain American people have not been paying attention.
> The likely response from the United States at that point will be to pull the plug on the entire war effort
The military purpose is obvious, but the political purpose of the eight NATO multinational battlegroups forward deployed in Eastern Europe, and particular of the fact that each of the three nuclear powers in NATO anchors one of them, is to provide certainty to both other NATO members and hostile powers that that will not be, from any of the NATO nuclear powers, the response to an attack on Eastern Europe, whether conventional or nuclear.
> Please don’t downvote me; I am not a propagandist for any side.
And, yet, your characterization of Russian motivations, US motivations, and the likely future progression are all straight out of Russian propaganda.