Good morning Agmoore,
right, resisting is more an individual choice than ever. This situation immediately reminded me of what you told me about your experiences with Vietnam. Dont you think there is non-cooperative element to those indirect wars between Russia and the West? I mean right now we Europeans get the demographics we need (women and children) and I'm afraid that after a few months there will be no reason for them to return, their men and families will be dead, their homes destroyed which in a perverted way benefits the EU. Then there is the moral hazard of economic growth. The civil economy literally halted and war keeps the economic wheel spinning on all sides. The sanctions of the US are not effective since you are not a big consumer of Russian Oil and Gas. We, on the other hand, don't sanction gas and literally finance that war (at 55% Russian gas of total consumption) and the SWIFT move is fine and good but SWIFT is not even a transaction system...It is a telecommunication system to announce transactions but settlement happens elsewhere. 96% of high-value transactions are running on the transnational CHIPS systems, which is resistant against sanctions. I don't see a solution, Vietnam and Afghanistan were also not solved. Other countries need to put pressure on the German goverment. The ties to russian oligarchs are very strong.
It's interesting that I sent out a tweet in the last week or so about demographic imperialism. I was referring to the Russian traditional (Chinese in Tibet, U. S in Hawaii, etc. etc. etc.) depopulation of territory and repopulating with their own nationals. However, what you describe is the back end of the process. People are commodities, pieces on the chess board to be arranged en masse to suit different entities' long-term, national goals.
Association between oligarchs and captains of industry: I keep thinking of Mutter Courage--read that play at a formative time in my life and it never seemed more relevant.
What to do? Believe little of what we read and know that at all times there is an effort to manipulate us.
Hope we all come out of this one OK, but those poor Ukrainians will not.
Stay well my friend.