A few thoughts. Most people here probably don't have a very good understanding about what this conflict is about. And it's sure as heck a lot more complicated than (a) this guy is bad; (b) this other guy is good. That said, (a) that guy is bad, and it's not altogether surprising that he's finally pushed hard enough to find at least one limit of what the "west" is willing to overlook. Seems like it was only a matter of time.
However, it's one thing to talk a big game, it's entirely another to go to war with one of the biggest kids on the block. It's one thing to invade Iraq (or even Iran), it's quite another to take on a military/government like Russia's (or, say, China). The scale is vastly different, and yes, nukes and MAD make the calculus completely different. We are very unlikely to get into a direct, NATO vs. Russia, shooting war. Much of what is happening here appears to be Putin testing just how far he can go and get away with it.
War sucks. It seems to be part of the human condition, so it's hard to say it's inhumane, but a lot of innocent people suffer. That's true in every war, no matter the righteousness of the cause.
B-52s are actually used (sometimes) for SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense)--but only when the opponent isn't at the top of the technological ladder. Because of their huge radar signature, the Air Force has (at times) flown them at high altitude to bait the enemy's air defenses to fire at them, thus showing the bad guys' precise location to the fighters carrying the HARMs designed especially to take out air defense sites. I spoke with a B-52 navigator who described watching a SAM, which wasn't supposed to be able to reach his plane's altitude, essentially crest his wing over Kosovo before dropping harmlessly below him. Most SAMs have proximity fuses, so "crest his wing" probably sounds closer than it really was (if it was the way I imagine it, the fuse would have blown and would have damaged the plane). But the Russians have air defense technology that is easily good enough that we wouldn't use B-52s in that role. The rumor I was told by the fighter pilots I knew in the 1990s is that one of the discoveries towards the end of the Soviet era is that we underestimated the Soviet's missile technology by a fair margin. While the pilots all trusted our planes much more than the Russian counterparts, the Russian air-to-air missiles were probably largely better than ours were. (The early sidewinders, Aim-9s (IR), and Aim-7s (radar guided), for instance, kinda sucked. I have no idea about now. Similarly, the main Russian shoulder fired antiaircraft missiles, the SA-7, -14, and -16 were all probably better than their NATO/US counterparts--at least well into the 1980s.)
But equipment only gets you as far as your training/personnel. That seems to be a problem for Russia so far.
One of the surprises about this war, to date, is the apparently low quality of the invasion forces that Russia has deployed. It seems pretty clear that Putin/his military leaders did not expect much resistance from the Ukraine. They also have not followed the more methodical approach that we are used to from the U.S.-led wars of the last three decades, e.g., a sustained air campaign before launching the ground invasion. Maybe their calculation of the politics was that they couldn't go that route. Unquestionably, Russia has a massive advantage over the Ukraine in an air war.
