“Cripple them economically.” That requires that their primary source of hard currency, the sale of oil and gas, be minimized.
***The Russians weren’t even interested in western Ukraine until oil was found there. Their interest is simply in raping that country. Russia gets 60% of its revenues from oil exports. Europe gets 40% of their oil from Russia.
In 2012 massive oil and gas reserves were found in Crimea. Crimea signed a $10 billion exploration contracts with Shell and Chevron to develop the new found oil and gas fields. These oil and gas products would compete in Europe with Russia’s oil and gas, reducing Russia’s oil revenues, which we recall amount to 60% of their total GDP. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, cancelling the contracts with Shell and Chevron.
But Ukraine still had massive reserves in, you guessed it, Donetsk and Luhansk, and other areas East of the Dnieper River. In 2019, Energy Secretary Rick Perry visited Ukraine, and soon after Ukraine awarded exploration contracts to a consortium of U.S. oil companies. Again, these oil reserves would compete in Europe with Russian oil, so Putin is invading Ukraine to shut down this latest attempt to extract Ukrainian oil and sell it in competition with Russian oil.
This explanation makes more sense to me than the “Putin feels threatened by NATO expansion” excuses for the invasion.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4044221/posts?page=1#1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CmdSzVFSKc
If the Ukes allow some small region in the west to be its own republic, but the OIL belongs to Ukraine, do ya think Pootypoot would allow that? Nope.
I would agree with you to a limited extent - money is definitely a big motivating factor.
But the simple fact is that NATO - specifically the US - lied to them about expanding NATO; with the prospect of letting Ukraine join, Russia would have faced NATO forces armed with the most modern equipment, used by the most highly skilled operators in the world (with the possible exception of the Israelis), the very distinct possibility of nukes - and all of that within a very short distance of Russia’s major population centers and industrial & military facilities. That’s not nothing, not by a long shot - though I’ll agree with you that it also isn’t everything.