This war started ten years ago when a US-backed fascist coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government, for the sole purpose of persecuting the country’s Russian minority. When a chunk of Ukraine’s army defected to fight for the Russian-speaking Urkainian civilians, a low-intensity civil war began. During this time the Ukrainian nazis incessantly bombed the civilian centers of Donetsk and Luhansk, using not only regular munitions, but cluster bombs and white phosphorus.

Russia tried over and over again to solve this problem through diplomacy, because Putin is a cold-blooded, lily-livered coward whose only concern was selling gas to Europe. However, the US continuously sabotaged relations, riling up, funding and arming the nazis to continue their ethnic cleansing campaign. After threatening to let Ukraine join NATO (a promise they privately told Zelensky would never happen) they finally, finally dragged Russia into a hot war - one that Russia first spent a fucking week beforehand recognising the independence of the DPR and LPR, then signing a defence pact with them, and finally starting the SMO in what is possibly one of the most telegraphed invasions of all time.

Russia then continued to conduct the war in the most limited, precisely targeted manner of any war this century, to the extent that the initial push was more like a militarised police action. Instead of obliterating all of Ukraine’s infrastructure, as for instance the US did to Iraq while “liberating them from their dictator”, they targeted only the unmanned electrical substations that powered the train network, preventing Ukrainian troop movement. For the first week, Russia continued sending gas through Ukrainian pipelines, for which they paid the Ukrainian government transit fees, which only stopped because the Ukrainians shut the pipes off!

After easily blowing up a huge amount of Ukrainian materiel and sending an armored column to wait outside Kiev, Russia began negotiating peace. A deal was struck and was about to be signed in April 2022, until Boris Johnson personally visited Kiev and promised Zelensky unlimited funding from the West if the war continued, or being totally cut off if they took the peace. Zelensky bowed to his fascist Western handlers, with the result that 600,000 Ukrainians are now dead for no reason as the peace terms back then, as it has come out since, were far more favorable than they’ll be able to get now. The West’s insane hatred for, and need to break open and feast on, Russia has caused an unfathomable amount of death. On the other hand, allowing Ukraine to exist in its nazified, militarized state is an existential threat for Russia that they cannot possibly allow - if only someone with power in Russia had told the west this motivation, perhaps in a televised speech in a very succinct way. Anyway, here’s some Russian politician or other:

You’re mostly correct except Russia obviously doesn’t want to annex Ukraine, only the majority Russian parts that have been treated as second class citizens by Ukraine’s nazi government. If they annexed all of it, they’d only create larger problems for themselves in the borders with NATO members; keeping Ukraine neutral is the whole point (and is beneficial for everyone except arms dealers as you pointed out)

They could have done the reddit thing and accuse me of the GRIEVOUS crime of INCIVILITY. After all, I called a moron a moron

Yeah if you’re a fucking moron, ignorant of NATO expansionism or general strategic goals regarding Russia, and think the war started in 2022 because you have literally no understanding of historical context

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis

If you were alive in the Cuban missile crisis you’d be saying some wild stuff like “Turkey NEEDED those nukes!”

We try.
So far, we’ve not defederated from hexbear.
When we have a thread that’s 50% comments from another instance, upvoted solely by that instance, it’s shit.