This kind of fell off my radar after my earlier posts about false and evil language that we have been taught to repeat unawares.
I think both Dogheaded and Valeriy, for example, have expressed truths even in their disagreement. I think the chief mistake, where anyone makes it, is in ignoring or dismissing a statement by the “other side” that has some justice.
Most of the talk about borders seems to me to miss a vital historical fact - that the ethnic populations have been mixed for a century (actually long before, but greatly accelerated under Stalin). Also, “Ukrainization” -a policy instituted beginning sme twenty years ago - played a real role in heightening the tensions between these mixed populations. It was out of an understandable desire to create a more homogenous identity for Ukraine, but, unfortunately, it did wind up steamrollering the Russian population (and others, but here it is the Russian that concerns us). The election of Yanukovich mollified the Russians, and “Ukrainization” eased up, and friendly relations with Russia at the time were largely saved. (I remember traveling through Ukraine in 2012, and was quote impressed with both the relative friendliness and efficiency of the Ukrainian border guards. I apprciated it all the more after experiencing the crossings through Romania and Bulgaria.)
But all that time, NATO had been creeping eastward in spite of the promises ywenty years prior that it would not. It was then that America began more openly courting Ukraine, and holding out EU and NATO membership like doggie bones. John McCain and Victoria Nuland came to Kiev (as did the Bidens) and helped foment the Orange Revolution and the Maidan. (Actual corruption in the existing government helped whip up support for that, I think).
After that, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was essentially at stake. If Ukraine joined NATO, well, isn’t it obvious? You couldn’t turn Russia’s equivalent of Norfolk over to the West’s equivalent of the Warsaw Pact. Thus the annexation of the Crimea. And THAT just led to the acceleration of anti-Russianness in the Ukraine and the start of the separatist movement in the Donbass, the most heavily Russian part of the Ukraine.
I agree with a lot that Valeriy said as well. One thing that got left out was the enshrinement in 2019 of the intention to join NATO into Ukraine’s constitution. (I don’t see the legitimacy of stating an intended political alliance in a constitution, but it was done...). That, and Patriarch Bartholemew’s uncanonical acknowledgement of the schismatic “Church” were last straws that led to Russia’s decision for war. IF they had stopped with the Donbass, I might have been able to go on defending Russia, as most of you remember I did for some years. But that leads to the other point - the conduct of the war.
It ought to be obvious even to a child that this conduct of war as a quagmire that goes nowhere in particular is deliberate. Dogheaded rightly noted that the talk of swift victory was propaganda - and I have friends in Russia who fell for it. It seems evident to me now that the Russian aim is to make Ukraine a no-man’s land - if it should go to the West, it will be as a thoroughly destroyed land, unprofitable and unfruitful. The former breadbasket of the Soviet Union is to be made a wasteland if it is to be handed over to enemies. As long as NATO stays out of it, they are content to stop at a certain point. NATO was deliberately resurrected, or kept on life support, by inventing enemies to maintain the military spending. Thus, in the 90’s, Desert Storm and Serbia, the deliberate fomenting of enmity to justify the military budgets and the sweet trillions of $$$ they had gotten used to making in the Cold War.
