At that point you’re kind of arguing that there was only one World War with a 20-year armistice. I can see what they mean, and certainly tensions are escalating, but we’ve still made a concerted effort to not drag more people in while limiting the expansion of Russia’s territory.
In 5 or 10 years we will be talking about how we avoided the Russia-Ukraine conflict expanding into another world war or we will be talking about how these were the first stages of that conflict.