North American fifa obsessives?

The original invasion of Russian troops was quite limited, and they didn’t have a large Airforce cover. At that time, Ukraine would have had Air Defence active.

No the original goal, as stated by Putin, was to disrupt NATO activities on the Eastern border that were indistinguishable from deploying nuclear capabilities that allowed the USA to continue pursuing its dream of a nuclear first strike.

The initial goal was to end the ethnic cleansing in Donbas(by 22, one million people had fled to Russia), this of course means destroying Ukranian military capabilities involved in that. The stated cassus belli was resposibility to protect, referencing the NATO campaign against Serbia to seperate Kosovo from it. Back then (when the West was bombing Serbia) Russia stated that this would serve as bad precedent case.

Everything else had been tried. Ended with the west lying to Russians face (Minsk 2). Once peaceful diplomatic means are exhausted, what did you think would happen? War is diplomacy by other means. To freely quote Klausewitz.

Agreed.

The idea that Russia landed airborne troops in Kyiv without wanting to at the very least overthrow the Ukrainian government (just as the US likes to overthrow Latin American countries, which leftists rightly deride as imperialist, but many can’t seem to recognize when non-western countries do it) is laughable. It also ignores Putin’s clearly-stated belief that Ukraine has no legitimate existence as a separate country, a belief that he reiterated during his interview with Tucker Carlson instead of saying anything that Western supporters of Russia wanted him to say. It ALSO fails to mention reports from early in the invasion that Putin has personally rejected a peace deal because he wanted to go to war.

Which was not the stated goal, his position regarding the ukrainian state is pretty irrelevant to this matter.

The idea that the war was over NATO membership is outright nonsense, since that goal HAD ALREADY BEEN ACHIEVED by the annexation of Crimea and support for separatist factions, since NATO membership requires territorial integrity.

Not the first time NATO made exceptions, half of Cyprus is occupied by Turkey. Just because you do not know history, do not assume that others also do not.

The statement that the West gave Ukraine their most advanced weapons is a ridiculous lie to anyone watching Ukraine beg for years to get moderately updated tanks and jets, and mid-range ATACMs. In reality, the Biden administration had been withholding the best weapons specifically because they wanted the war to end like this and just didn’t want to admit it. The things people do are more important than what they say.

Ukraine got Leo2s in the most up to date configuration, PzH2000 and just to mention the modern german tuff they got. Yes also lots of old stuff, like Leo1s. But among the stuff they got, modern weapons were there.

The article conveniently fails to mention any Russian war crimes, such as the repeated bombing of civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals (only a bad thing when Israel does it, apparently), the Bucha massacre, or reports of mass graves in occupied areas.

This leaves out the fact that Ukrainian forces were and are known to use these locations for fire positions. Even more obvious if you saw pictures of those locations. The old soviet complexes were well planned and compact, schools were often surrounded by a ring of connected high rise habitation units. This meant that the schools were well protected from the weather, but also made the while complex veritable fortresses.

What are russian troops supposed to do? Not fire back? No matter ones position towards the SMO, this is a ridiculous notion.

Consider this. The USA dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan while negotiating with them, in particular negotiating with them through the USSR. The USA made it very clear that it’s mission was to “contain the spread of communism” which meant creating lethal threat to the USSR and particularly Russia. It took over the imperial colony of Korea from Japan and then proceeded to destroy fully half the country by creating completely artificial pretense.

It built NATO which sponsored and trained neo-nazi groups all over Europe through operation Gladio, it protectes Nazi officers and even gave them high command of NATO. It deployed nukes throughout Europe specifically targeting Russia and it pursued an end of MAD so that it could establish some path way to nuking Russia without retaliation.

Then the USSR was dismantled and the USA oversaw the complete destruction of the old economy and economic shock therapy that killed millions of Russians. But the conflict didn’t end despite communism ending. The US kept building up its nuclear capabilities through NATO. And it turned NATO offensive. The destruction of Yugoslavia was as much symbolic as physical, with Yugoslavia the last of the communist programs in the region.

Russia attempted to join the imperialist club. It wanted to split the world with the imperialists and make a lot of money doing it, but the USA said no. And then proceeded to demonstrate that it would stop at nothing less than full subjugation of Russia. The USA was on the ground during the EuroMaidan event, mere months after the first ever NATO exercise in Ukraine. After EuroMaidan, the number of military exercises with NATO and Ukraine increased tremendously, and included nuclear capabilities and even included a simulated invasion of Kaliningrad. They were flying b-52 bombers in Ukraine to show their readiness to deploy nukes.

Russia, through many many negotiations and even treaties, has been trying to get the other side to the negotiating table for decades now. Russia does not want to be full subjugated by the West but every single piece of evidence we have is that the USA wants Russia subjugated and it has not stopped pushing for those conditions.

Russia has been escalating incredibly judiciously, incredibly explicitly, without any real attempt at hiding the fact that it cannot afford to lose the neutrality of Eastern Ukraine as a buffer against invasion - invasion that happened once under Napoleon, once after WW1, and once again by the Third Reich. This is not a hypothetical issue. Every invasion of Russia took that route and killed millions.

So yes, it is wild that invading a neighbor is the only way that the USA can be brought to the negotiating table, and even at that it took years of death before the USA would even entertain it. But that’s the bloodlust we have to deal with.

First time contact with reality, I see.