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Not really. The Putin puffers in here often can't even manage to get the most basic of basics right, like matching the "reply to" name to the post they're replying to. No wonder they struggle to comprehend anything bigger than a couple of paragraphs, and so have to dismiss anything posted that actually involved THINKING as "AI slop". Critical thinking really isn't their strong point.

There are hundreds of thousands of people now dead who might characterize the dangers of provoking Russia differently, if they could still speak.

FAIL. You're still accepting the premise of "provoking Russia" as fact. It is not fact. It is utter fiction. Demonstrably so. Ukraine's NATO and EU relationships pre-2014 were exactly the same as Russia's... until Putin got captured by the Dugin empire-restoration kool-aid.

This CSPAN clip from June 18, 1997 better than anything highlights how poorly neocons predict the outcome of their actions...

I've equally said the neocon position for decades has been utterly brainless; while European NATO was bending over backwards to invite Russia in from the cold, the neocons kept baiting Moscow by trying to invite Ukraine into NATO even though Ukraine wasn't even interested at the time.

Thing is, though, I can walk and chew gum at the same time, even if you can't. So my take on it is that despite American stupidity, Europe wasn't being stupid. Russia could see that. So Russia should've just accepted that the Americans banging on about Ukraine joining NATO were talking out of turn and calling for something NOBODY ELSE was calling for. Ukraine wasn't applying. Germany, France and others were saying even if Ukraine did apply they'd veto the application. Ukraine and Russia both knew the neocons were talking absolute nonsense.

And when YOU know something is nonsense, and you know nearly everyone else also knows it's nonsense, trying to argue "but we decided to take it seriously which is why we tried to assassinate a Presidential candidate, flooded the country with political dissidents and mercenary fighters, spent years bribing and blackmailing their political leaders, and waged a 20-year cyber war against people who were no threat to us" to stand up as a rational argument.

Ukraine is a decrepit Third World country whose pre-war per-capita GDP was the lowest in Europe with the exceptions of Kosovo and Moldova, roughly on par with Guatemala in economic terms.

As others have said, there are three good reasons for that.

The first is Russian political interference and its endemic sponsorship of corrupt practices carried over from the Soviet days, which was preventing Ukraine from modernising and generating wealth. One of the reasons why Ukraine was pivoting to Europe was because it recognised, far better trade terms and far more wealth would come to it if it adopted modern international standards of accountability and transparency, and ended the corrupt Mafia ways of working that were holding them back. But every time Ukraine or Russia has someone promising to end the Mafia way of working, Putin sees this as a direct challenge to his power, and so he goes to war against them. (Example: when Khordokovsky unilaterally opened all his businesses up to external inspection and audit, purely to prove to Europe and the USA that his businesses were Mafia-free, Putin went to war against Khordokovsky.)

The second is, Ukraine was one of the bread baskets of the global food market, but it is actually very difficult to turn an agriculture-heavy economy into one where everyone involved in the agribusiness is getting rich.

The third is, Ukraine's mineral, mechanical and industrial industries were massively under-developed and the big players who could've changed that were in the West, not in Russia. Don't you think it's telling that Putin only developed an interest in grabbing the Azov sea and Crimea after Ukraine sealed deals with the West on fuel exploration and extraction? Instead of going to market with massivel discounted oil and gas so that Russia got the political benefit and the oligarchs at the top of the chain got stupendously rich, Ukraine chose the alternative - a properly regulated market where anyone could buy shares in the companies involved and get rich from the fuel being sold at decent, profitable price while being reassured that it wasn't being run like a Mafia operation.

It takes extra special levels of incuriousness to get to a point where you can see Ukraine was being held back WHILE IT WAS IN THE RUSSIAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE and not ask the question, maybe the problem wasn't Ukraine mismanaging itself so much as Ukraine being held back by being in Russia's sphere of influence where the Mafia way of doing business works hand in glove with the Kremlin.