The question remains: When did the relationship between Russia and Ukraine become a matter of such vital interest to the U.S. that we would risk war, possible nuclear war, with Russia over it? How did we get here?

During the 70 years that the Soviet Union existed, Ukraine was an integral part of the nation.

Yet this geographic and political reality posed no threat to the United States. A Russia and a Ukraine, both inside the USSR, was an accepted reality that was seen as no threat for the seven decades that they were united.

Yet, today, because of a month-old war between Russia and Ukraine, over who shall control Crimea, the Donbas and the Black and Azov Sea coasts of Ukraine, America seems closer to a nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Why? Time to step back and reflect on what is at stake.

Exactly what threat does Russia’s invasion of Ukraine present to us that is so grave we would consider military action that could lead to World War III and Russia’s use of battlefield nuclear weapons against us?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hinted at the use of such weapons, should NATO intervene in the Ukraine war and Russia face defeat, or in the event of an “existential” threat to the Russian nation.

We hear from our moral elites that morality commands us to intervene to save the Ukrainian people from the ravages of a war that has already taken thousands of Ukrainian lives.

But what would be the justification for U.S. military intervention in Ukraine, absent a congressional authorization or declaration of war?

Consider. The year the Liberal Hour arrived in America with the New Deal, 1933, a newly inaugurated Franklin D. Roosevelt formally recognized Joseph Stalin’s murderous regime as the legitimate government of a Russia-led USSR.

FDR met personally with Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov even as the Holodomor, the forced starvation of Ukrainian peasants and small farmers, the kulaks and their families, was far advanced.

Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in Moscow, won a Pulitzer for covering up that crime of the century with its estimated 4 million dead.

The question remains: When did the relationship between Russia and Ukraine become a matter of such vital interest to the U.S. that we would risk war, possible nuclear war, with Russia over it?

How did we get here?

We got here by exploiting our Cold War victory as an opportunity to move NATO, our Cold War alliance, into a dozen countries in Central and Eastern Europe, up to the borders of Russia. Then, we started to bring Ukraine into NATO, the constituent republic of the old Soviet Union with the longest and deepest history with Mother Russia.

Thus, while Putin started this war, the U.S. set the table for it.

We pushed our military alliance, NATO, set up in 1949 to contain and, if necessary, fight Russia, 1,000 miles to the east, right into Russia’s face.

In the 1930s, when Britain’s Lady Astor was asked if she knew where Hitler was born, she answered: “Versailles.”

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which produced the Versailles Treaty, millions of Germanic peoples and the lands they had inhabited were severed from German rule and distributed to half a dozen nations across Europe.

When we get back on our feet, we will take back all that we have lost, said Gen. Hans von Seeckt of the German General Staff.

We hear warnings that if Russia uses chemical weapons in Ukraine, NATO will react militarily. But if no NATO ally is attacked, why would NATO respond to a Russian attack on Ukraine?

Though outlawed today, chemical weapons were used by all the major participants in World War I, including the Americans.

As for atomic weapons, only Americans have used them.

And while we did not introduce the bombing of cities — the British and Germans did that — we did perfect the carpet-bombing of cities like Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Tokyo.

The Ukrainian war, now a month old, has demonstrated the utility of nuclear weapons. Putin’s credible threat to use them has caused the U.S. and NATO to flatly refuse Kyiv’s request to put a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

And as Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons has deterred NATO from intervening on Ukraine’s side in this war, other nations will not miss the message: Possession of nukes can deter even the greatest nuclear powers.

The longer this war goes on, the greater the suffering and losses on all sides. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are already dead, with 10 million uprooted from their homes, a third of that number having fled into neighboring states of Eastern Europe.

The longer the war goes on, the greater the likelihood Putin resorts to indiscriminate bombing and shelling to kill off the resistance, and the greater the possibility that the war expands into NATO Europe.

Meanwhile, in the secure American homeland, 5,000 miles from Kyiv, there is no shortage of foreign policy scholars beating the drums for a “victory” over Putin’s Russia and willing to fight to achieve that victory — right down to the last Ukrainian.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears less pressured to meet and talk. What does this tell us? Zelenskyy does not believe further fighting will benefit Ukraine as much as it will cost his country. And he wants the war over.

“It’s time to meet, time to talk … time to restore territorial integrity … for Ukraine,” said President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday.

Zelenskyy added that the need to negotiate was even greater for Moscow. “Otherwise, Russia’s losses will be so huge that several generations will not be enough to rebound.”

According to the Pentagon, Russia has lost 7,000 soldiers; Kyiv puts the figure at 14,000 dead.

Still, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears less pressured to meet and talk. What does this tell us?

Zelenskyy does not believe further fighting will benefit Ukraine as much as it will cost his country. And he wants the war over.

As for Putin, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Sunday, “He’s not been able to achieve the goals that he wants to achieve as rapidly as he wants to achieve them.” Putin wants more time.

The Russian president began the invasion of Ukraine with Crimea already annexed and the enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk having already declared their independence of Kyiv.

Since the invasion began, however, Putin’s forces have besieged but not taken Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, or second largest city, Kharkiv.

Yet, Russian troops are now in Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, having completed a land bridge from Russia through the Donbas to Crimea and, from there, halfway to Odessa, the last major Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

While the Ukrainian army and citizens have put up fiercer resistance than was anticipated in Moscow, Russia is not losing this war.

Measured by territorial gains, Putin is winning

He has not captured Kyiv or Kharkiv, but he has expanded the Russian-controlled territories of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea that he had at the start of his invasion.

While Russia’s costs and casualties have been far greater than was anticipated, Putin has added to the Ukrainian lands he held when the war began. And Mother Russia has not lost an inch of land in this war.

“How does this thing end?” Gen. David Petraeus famously asked on the road to Baghdad.

No political solution appears more likely than a new partition of Ukraine, with lands east of the Dnieper River and along the coasts of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea being ceded to Moscow, and the west of Ukraine being declared a neutral nation like Austria or Finland in the Cold War.

The problem with this probable outcome is that Zelenskyy has ruled out any territorial concessions or land transfers from Ukraine to Russia. And he seeks to “restore,” not to make permanent, the 2014 amputations of Crimea and the Donbas.

The dilemma: Zelenskyy probably cannot survive ceding control of any Ukrainian land to Russia. And Putin probably cannot survive a failure in peace talks to expand the Ukrainian holdings with which he began the war.

The “territorial integrity” of Ukraine is the crucial issue in ending this war.

And it is precisely here where it appears impossible for both sides to come to terms.

The one issue on which both parties will likely agree in any peace settlement is the issue that should have been agreed to — to prevent the war: a formal declaration by Kyiv that it will never join a NATO alliance created to contain Russia and, if necessary, defeat Russia in a war.

A frustrated and enraged President Joe Biden has taken to calling Putin a “killer,” a “murderous dictator” and a “war criminal” who has launched an “immoral war” — comments the Kremlin calls “unforgivable”

Such rhetoric would seem to rule out any role for U.S. diplomacy in negotiating the end to this war. Other nations — Israel, Turkey, France, Germany — have maintained regular relations and constant contact with Putin, who sits and broods atop the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Consider the moral dilemma the U.S. has put itself in.

Our president says Russia is led by “a war criminal,” conducting an “immoral” war in which deliberate atrocities are committed at hospitals, schools, kindergartens and art theaters.

Yet, the U.S. and NATO will not provide weapons to Ukraine, including secondhand MiGs, that might cause Russia to retaliate against us or NATO or risk World War III or risk Russia’s use of tactical atomic weapons.

Because, pillaged and persecuted though Ukraine may be, it is not a member of NATO.

If Latvia, however, with 5% of Ukraine’s population, is encroached upon, we will engage Russia militarily, and to hell with the risk of World War III or Russia’s possible retaliation with atomic weapons.

In war, the moral is to the material as three is to one, said Napoleon. Unfortunately, what George Bernard Shaw said cynically also appears to be true: In war, God is on the side of the big battalions.

Zelenskyy probably cannot survive signing away the title to any Ukrainian land, be it Crimea or the Donbas. And Putin likely cannot survive not bringing home new territory from a Russian “victory.”

Again, perhaps the one issue on which almost all now agree is that Ukraine renounce its right to join the NATO alliance.