Putin's (I'd say Russian) motivations were stated open and clear in 2021: we want NATO to stop expanding to the East. We asked West to discuss this thing and put an end to NATO expansion.
All of our demands were declined in the most obnoxious manner possible: "You mean nothing, we don't want to listen to your concerns, go away and die silently in your Siberia"
> Just like I don’t get veto power over your friendships, Russia does not get to decide who other sovereign nations get to be friends with.
NATO is an aggressive military alliance. Ukraine could be friends with EU and US and not be a part of NATO.
> The NATO excuse doesn’t explain the invasion and partial annexation of Georgia in 2008, either.
Do you really know anything about what happened in 2008? Honestly, not from the media and not from Wikipedia. Because regurgitating the easy-peasy propaganda from media is not interesting in any way.
How can you be so sure that it was Russia that "invaded" Georgia in 2008? How comes that although Russia beat the Georgian military force so easily that we could capture the whole Georgia, we didn't do it? There was nothing to stop us in 2008. How comes that "greedy Putin" didn't take Tbilisi and everything with it?
I always find it interesting when people being up the 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the government the people elected)
Likely because people who know anything about the region know that that supposedly damning call happened after three months of violent protests against the most corrupt government in recent European history.. the reference to Klitchko being made deputy PM means it was recorded after Jan 26th which was when Yanukovych was trying everything to stay in power, including bringing opposition leaders into his government (and working with Russian intelligence to bug US diplomatic phones). He was doing so because many regional offices had already been taken over by protesters and his police forces had already shot several people. The leader who the US diplomats were talking about was already a popular opposition leader, so it's entirely unsurprising that Yatsenyuk was part of government post-Maidan.
I think I'm mostly annoyed with these dumb conspiracy theories because they deny agency to the millions of people who actually cast out a criminal and democratically elected their own leadership. "hurr durr, the CIA did it"
The aggression in Georgia long predates that call, and the US expressing a preference in an election is hardly unusual. Are we to believe Putin didn't have a preference in the Ukrainian elections?
