“Behind Putin, fighting to replace him are hardliners who want all out war.”
Now try selling this to the average Russian who was never threatened by anything the Ukrainians were doing. There are exactly no Ukrainian forces occupying any part of antebellum Russia. Ukraine is not an existential threat to Russia.
So how do you sell the Russian people on launching into a second Great Patriotic War when they really don’t need to do this? Their kids are not at threat, nor are their homes, nor are their lands.
What’s their motivation?
What motivation we did see out of Russia was in the form of some 700,000 to 1,500,000 Russians who packed up and left the country when the war started.
They’re not going to come back to bleed for Putin’s imperial war.
Any other wannabe Czar will face the same circumstance or worse.
—> Ukraine is not an existential threat to Russia.
A NATO ukraine is a threat to Russia.
And so far, Putin has done enough to accomplish most of what he wants without justifying NATO involvement.
But let NATO create a false flag and begin attacking, and you will galvanize the population.
And that is what the neocons want
Their relatives kids, home and land were in danger in Donetsk and Lugansk. Ethnic Russians were the largest ethnic group in those oblasts.
And, that is far more of justification for Russia to invade that it was for us in the first Iraq war to save Kuwait.
Let's we fomented an illegal coup in Ukraine. Installed a government hostile to Russia and the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine. We funded and trained a 600,000 man Ukrainian army that included neo-Nazis. We armed Ukraine with weapons that could reach Russian territory. We teased NATO membership for Ukraine. And, we were running biolabs in Ukraine with deadly pathogens in them.
If Russia or China had done anything like that in Mexico, what do you think we'd do?