I thought he was wanting to reconstitute the old Russian Empire, and had been planning how to regain Ukraine for decades.
“I thought he was wanting to reconstitute the old Russian Empire, and had been planning how to regain Ukraine for decades.”
He didn’t quite state that, although the Neocons and Zeepers have been claiming the above and/or claiming he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. I always ask them for links, but they never seem to be able to find any.
What Putin did say was that when the Soviet Union broke up, there was some 20 Million Russians trapped in now-foreign countries...which did bother him (as an American, the idea of our government giving a crap about trapped Americans is a foreign concept, though). That was it.
If Putin had been plotting to take Ukraine, as the Zeepers claim, he would have at least doubled the size of his military as the force he sent there in 2022 was never going to have a chance against a country of 40 Million people, three-quarters of them hostile (to see the least) to Russia. So it’s important to understand that what happened in 2022 was an attempt to get Ukraine to negotiate, but the Neocons never wanted that - after all, they had the war against Russia that they dreamed of, or at least the justification needed to sink the Russian economy and thus overthrow Putin...obviously things didn’t turn out was they planned!