Why make an agreement with someone who just broke several? Also "we take what we want" is not exactly a compromise. "West" would effectively lose its creditability and face by just letting Russia, that has the initiative now, get whatever it wants.
Do Russians understand that EU and NATO both to a very large degree exist because people are fed up with wars and arms races and don't really happen to care if their countries are world wide military powers or not, and especially they don't want the borders to be moved in Europe by force ever again. The scars of the 2 world wars remain very deep.
One can understand Russia's behavior but it doesn't need to be accepted.
I predict that Russians will continue to blame Obama for their own aggression.
Probably.
You start with an accusation that the west is to blame and then act offended when I turn it around. What possible purpose does this serve except to be a dick? You just act like a dick, wait for someone to call you a dick and then tell them your rude.
Both the west and Russia are to blame for getting into this hardheaded conrontation and prolonging the war.
It should be easy to to pull troops out of East Ukraine. It would have been easy to not annex Crimea.
The whole political crisis has been one big political hodgepodge of blame and escalating hostilities, with, as I said
both the west and Russia having a part in the institutialisation of the current conflict and neither of the sides being able to claim moral superiority. On Russia's side, we have the whole annexation, which NATO boldly claims is
unprecedented, and also the murky business with rebel support, which is pretty much a standard operating model of the western involvement in Libya and Syria. On Western side, we have
support of the Euromaidan that may or may not have actually accomplished anything,
supporting a rather
radically nationalistic, so to say, government in Ukraine and conveniently not mentioning what Kiyv
wants to do with the dissenters. Both factions
are reluctant to back down, as Erkki correctly said, Cameron, Obama and co. cannot really afford to let Putin get what he wants, while the man himself refuses to cooperate on any terms but his own.
Now, outside of politcians' offices, down on the ground, we have a civil war going on, which
wasn't provoked neither by Russia, not by the west, but was rather an unfortunate consequence of both, and in which I support the rebels, despite all the squabbling of their commanders for power, supplies and money (allegedly sometimes extorted), because unlike their opponents, they don't use
punitive regiments with an explisit task of, well,
punishing civilians and dissidents.
EDIT:
The Wall Street Journal's answer to the fake photo of Ukrainian jet.