>>43316573From the moment the SU fell, Ukraine region was immediately highlighted as an area of interest, due in part to its historical place as the center of the Russian empire, and the carry-on baggers that swarmed over the ex-CIS in general infested that region in particular.
It turned into a blistering sore on the continent. More internationalist skullduggery is done through there than pretty much any other place on earth. Laundering regressive elite money is just the start of it.
2013-14 was a notable tipping point, because the then incumbent head of state over the Ukraine region (Yanukovich) was looking like he was going to turn away from delivering ukraine to the atlantic empire, which naturally provoked a response from the atlantic empire; Victoria Nuland and friends immediately arranged a revolution to oust him, and replace with a more pliable figure; people especially in the east of ukraine naturally didn't like this and refused to go along; and this was when the fighting and killing between people and the occupational puppet regime started in earnest. (In a twist of historical irony, this was also the time where jewish oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky would start funding national socialist militias like azov to do the job of killing their neighbors.)
The Russian state as it existed then had a naval base in Sevastopol, and in response to the threat of the ongoing events moved to secure it by annexing the rest of Crimea. Which ended up getting them involved in the ongoing civil war in the rest of eastern ukraine as well.
The Kiev occupation army as it existed then pretty much completely collapsed immediately for various reasons of fakeness and gayness, and at that moment in time Putin could have rolled the whole region up with little to no resistance if he chose too.
He chose not too, in the event, which I think history will remember as ultimately a strategic mistake that would cost him and the rest of his people in the end. Many men, even powerful men, are yet timid when it comes to the prospect of fully grasping the reins of destiny, and riding bodly into a new world where none before have been willing to go. He kept inside the bounds of normalcy, as it existed, then, and expected his counterparts in the west to negotiate with him. There is a part of them that is afraid to recognize that 'normalcy' in fact was already long since over, and that they are like Will-E-Coyote walking over an empty gorge; they don't 'fall down' - recognize the new normal - until someone 'looks down' first.
The Minsk agreement happens - which immediately fails as a result of not actually recognizing the breakaway republics, and so Minsk II happens, which everyone involved on the USG side from Angela Merkel to Zelenskyy himself all later said was nothing more than a time buying measure they had no intention of honoring once they had built up sufficient forces.
The efforts for such build up of course began in earnest, the not!war steadily growing in intensity over the years. Things come to a tipping point, again, when Fidel Casto says the Soviet union should move nuclear weapons into Cuba - sorry, I mean when Volodomyyr Zelenskyy says that NATO should move nuclear weapons into Ukraine. One week later, a 'special military operation' begins, and now you are here (paying taxes to anal fisters).
