What Russia is doing on its border today is no different than what the United States has done throughout our own hemisphere since 1823 - preventing hostile foreign alliances within our defensive sphere. By enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, we have invaded many of the countries in our hemisphere at least once in the last 199 years.
Russian troops would not be in Ukraine today if the United States had not engineered the 2014 coup against Ukraine's democratically elected government in 2014 and spent the next 8 years building an anti-Russian government with a NATO-trained military. NATO's intentions in Ukraine were made clear at the close of its Bucharest Summit on April 3, 2008 when NATO declared its intention to expand its anti-Russian treaty alliance into Georgia and Ukraine. Russia will not permit an existential threat on its border, and is fighting now to avoid a much larger and more desperate war later.
Moscow is not acting alone in this action, as a third of the troops fighting alongside Russian forces are Ukrainian citizens of the Donestk and Lugansk oblasts who want to be free from the Kiev government that has opressed them and even banned them from speaking their native Russian language.
Sorry this is complete Russian propaganda. Both sides tried to influence Ukraine. Ukrainians didn't want to be in some shithole Russian CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) economic block. That Ukrainian president was elected promising to join the EU, and immediately announced Ukraine would join the Russian CIS. Massive demonstations forced him out. Since then there have been three presidents elected. Tell me how this justifies a Russian invasion 10 years later.
as a third of the troops fighting alongside Russian forces are Ukrainian citizens of the Donestk and Lugansk
Russians are grabbing any male on the streets of the occupied areas and forcing them in the army. Enthusiasm for fighting for Russia, is non-existent. Proven by one of the separatist leaders, Igor Girkin (defense minister of the DNR), who complains in 2014 Ukrainians don't want to fight for Russia: The few local men who have joined his militia are those aged over forty who were raised in Soviet times, and there is a complete absence of youth in his rebel ranks, Girkin says. “Where are the young people?” he asks, “Maybe in the gangs that are currently robbing, looting and wreaking havoc in the province?”
Bollocks. They haven’t banned the Ukrainian language. They prioritised Ukrainian over Russian at federal level and devolved language decisions to the oblasts... shock horror, that’s exactly what America has done, and Canada, and Wales...
The current laws don’t just allow regional variations (Crimea already had the power to keep Russian or Tartar as its official language), it included special exemptions for Crimean Tatar and other indigenous dialects, International English language and the official languages of the European Union; Russian, Byelorussian and Yiddish.
And all the statutes passed on this topic are in the public domain and are easily verified.
The Russian federation by contrast has banned Ukrainian language textbooks from schools and even started erasing maps of the independent Ukraine of 1990s - 2014 from the curriculum.