Jack shit. THAT’S what.
Russia got dissed by the West so they were justified in invading another country, is that your position?
So, no surprise, then, that in the face of talk about bringing Ukraine into NATO, concurrent with ethnic unrest targeting Russian people living as citizens of Ukraine, after Kiev turned away and utterly failed at any meaningful resolution to the civic unrest, and registered interest in being part of NATO, Putin felt that Russia had some moral obligation to intervene in the ethnic issue, and now could hear the clock ticking away the hours until the admission of Ukraine into NATO.
Contrary to the Russian propaganda that you are repeating, there was no targeting of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. As for intervening in the ethnic issue, Putin did that in 2014 when in used ethnic Russian surrogates to start the ethnic conflict.
Absorbing Ukraine into the Russian Federation wasn’t ever going to happen, no matter what pipe dreams NeoCons promulgated among the pearl clutchers in the West.
It seems that you are not familiar with Russian literature on the subject, or of Putin's remarks just last week in which he claimed that all of Ukraine was Russia's. The absorption of Ukraine is indeed the goal of this war, as can be seen in the peace terms that Russia has been demanding from the beginning. To deny this is either to be naïve or dishonest.
NOW, of course...? No chance; the price of peace has gone WAY, WAY UP. God only knows what it will take, now, but absolutely we can 100% hang the albatross on the necks of our infernal domestic NeoCon contingent.
On the contrary, Putin's demands from the very beginning entailed the complete subjugation of Ukraine. This was not the result of the price of peace going up because of Russian casualties. Putin could have had a NATO free Ukraine from the beginning, but he turned down Zelensky's offer because he was after more; he was after all of Ukraine.
You seems to have great difficulty spaying pressure to do a thing from accruing upon that pressure.
I explained the NeoCon-driven, post-Soviet exclusion of the Russian Federation, and the several pressure arising from it.
Nowhere did I say acting on those pressures was justified.
Try harder not to act like CNN; say what I said, not what I didn’t.
And if you’re going to contend that the ethnic issues in Ukraine were orchestrated out of Moscow, post substantive links.
Because everything I’ve already explained can be construed as NeoCon manipulation of the Russian Federation to orchestrate all that has come to pass, in order to both continue to uphold their demented “once a Soviet, never not a Soviet” meme, and continue to support American funding of, and providing of military hardware for, the war in Ukraine.
The ongoing stiff-arm of the RF at the behest of NeoCon foreign policy wonks kept them in position to be used as a reason for NATO expansion. Was the RF hostile, or had NeoCon mistreatment made them salty? Chicken? Egg? NeoCons never cared, because they knew mainstream media were too distracted by the now to ever expose the reality.
But I saw.
I saw the wall come down.
I saw the hope for a share in Western prosperity rise in the east.
And I saw the NeoCon machine leap into action to put cold water all over it.
“Once a Soviet, never NOT a Soviet!”
Mistrust of the Russian Federation was the order of the day, and never wouldn’t be.
What that would justify all of our military spending if we ever let Russians become our friends, or treating partners, a Most Favored Nation?
I’ll tell you what: NeoCon fortunes would topple into ruin.
And that is ALL you need to know about the political dynamics driving the rhetoric about Moscow: its a NeoCon psyop from one end to the other, engineered to keep squeezing war funding or of Mr. and Mrs. Main Street America.
You wanna save the fekkin world?
Put every damned NeoCon up against a wall with a blindfold and a Marlboro Red.
That’d get you well past halfway to peace around the globe.