Why hate them for grifting?
You seriously think you wouldn’t if you were in Zelenskyy’s shoes? If you were him, would you resist the hostile takeover by Russia or just cave in?
Option 3: would you have done what Yanukovych did - steal a billion dollars out of the Ukrainian banks (an investigation into that fraud is still ongoing); take a massive bung from Putin to crash his economy; and hand the keys to the Kremlin; and leg it to Russia after triggering a civil war for Putin’s benefit.
Nuland and Obama responded to Ukraine (under Poroshenko) reaching out. It’s not like America had no interests at all in Ukraine and USA & UK both signed the Budapest Memorandum, and we both sat on the UN Security Council.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But that was then. This is now.
Poroshenko’s been out of power for 3 years.
Azov supporting Rada were voted out.
Far more progress had been made on minsk 2 under Zelenskyy than minsk 1 under Poroshenko.
An armistice negotiated in 2019 had held up all the way to February 2022 - the DNR reported 3 combatant deaths in January in the Donbas and ZERO civilian casualties.
Between August 2021 and December 2021 the USA, NATO and Ukraine did everything short of making a picture book with crayon to tell Rusdia that the “NATO open door” would be kept open while Ukraine satisfies pre-membership conditions on a level of producing pigs that fly and generating snowballs in hell.
And finally the Poroshenko prohibitions on Russian were being contested by a Russian speaking president. He had resistance in the Rada still, but elections could’ve resolved that.
Zelenskyy was unpopular precisely because he was bending over backwards to accommodate both sides.
There’s literally nothing happening in Ukraine that didn’t overtly tick Russia’s list of demands.
The only thing that didn’t change is Putin still had a retarded hard-on for his Novorussiya Kyiv takeover, and Zelenskyy wasn’t going to let it happen.
Putin realised that another year wouldve seen the corruption in Ukraine prosecuted, Azov demilitarised, and every publicly stated demand met... But with Ukraine still firmly opposed to following Belarus into butt monkey status. He was surrounded by hawks, and is not as stronk as he once was.
So when Pushilin declared independence woth an electoral mandate of maybe 1000 collaborators and the troops under his command, AND ordered the civilian evacuation of Donbas on the most ludicrous of lies - that Z was absolutely going to invade and genocide the Russian speakers within days - Putin thought, “that’ll do, pig.”
I bet Putin has hindsight too. He would’ve been better off having a lavish state dinner with the hardliners and the gangsters trying to hijack territory in Ukraine, and serving a polonium borscht.
That comment was long, boring, and totally unconvincing.