Discussions, post-mortems, analysis, inflated egos, and all that jazz.

I came here to create questions for a quiz, and there's such great food here... :) I remember reading an article where the authors studied changes in animal behavior under the influence of hunger. The general scheme is as follows: under the influence of hunger, certain hormones are released into the animal's blood, which change its behavior: - The animal's pain threshold increases, and pain sensitivity decreases. - The animal becomes more risky and may even attack a stronger opponent. - The animal begins to solve simple puzzles better but struggles with complex ones; that is, its brain analyzes the situation faster but less deeply. - The animal becomes more aggressive, not only towards predators but also towards its own kind. These changes in behavior serve two purposes: either to increase the size of the food base through external expansion or to reduce the population through intraspecific violence. Humans, although more developed than animals, have inherited these hormonal mechanisms from their wild ancestors. Therefore, in conditions of hunger (in conditions of dissatisfaction with their material situation), they tend to behave similarly. Usually, this manifests either in a desire to fight an external enemy (expand the food base) or in a desire to fight an internal enemy (reduce the population size). And since humans are social beings and perceive war as a team sport, they first look for a team. In external warfare, the team is obvious - "us" versus "them," but in civil war, a dividing line must be drawn - for example, blacks versus whites, Catholics versus Protestants, peasants and workers versus landowners and capitalists, etc. Various ideologies are needed solely for this - to justify the composition of the team and indicate the criteria for belonging to it. And it doesn't matter how scientific this ideology is; it can be complete nonsense from a scientific point of view, but if it performs the function mentioned above, it becomes quite suitable for practical use. And, of course, it should not be too complex because the brain of a hungry person does not like long logical arguments; it prefers simpler slogans - "who to eliminate." Therefore, in the case of civil war, it is useless to explain to its participants that they have become victims of propaganda and are fighting "for the wrong thing." They are fighting very much "for something" - for clearing living space, whatever ideological justification is used for it. I heard the slogan: "We need the lands of Donbas, not its population" - it is crystal clear, and that is the whole point; civil wars usually have approximately this genesis. And if they are not interfered with, they are usually quite long and bloody, accompanied by genocide of certain social groups and their dehumanization ("subhumans," "colorados," etc.) to remove the psychological barrier to violence. So, solving the problems of Ukraine is very simple - you need to feed it; then 99% of the population will immediately forget about the centuries-long oppression by the Poles and Russians and everything else that they are currently being fed with. It's just expensive - Ukraine is large, and its neighbors have their own economic difficulties. An alternative is that if the war in Donbas had turned into a tank march on Kyiv (as the militants initially wanted) and escalated into a large-scale conflict with millions of casualties, this would have relieved social tension. In this regard, yes, Putin is greatly hindering the "development" of Ukraine by freezing all kinds of military activity and not allowing it to "have fun" and reduce the population to match the size of the food base.