You make the mistake of bi-polar thinking.
Their elections started going towards pro-Russian rather than pro-EU candidates so they responded by clamping down on anything Russian even to a degree banning the use of the language, then when the ethnically Russians started resisting the violence reached a point where the military was shelling Russian areas which caused the reactive violence from the Russians to escalate and eventually Russia was pulled into what had since at least 2014 been a civil war no one was yet paying attention to.
There does not have to be a public policy for anything, verbal orders are enough for something to be practical policy. The first step of ethnic cleansing if you are not prepared to do outright genocide is to eliminate the language and replace the souls of the people with a new one in your own image by forcing your language on them. There is a difference between promoting a language and attempting to eradicate another, even if they did not try to do this it was interpreted by the Russian Ukrainians as such. And I speak as someone who's great grandparents went through the same process where the then overlord attempted to replace their language in order to replace their identity.... and the current overlord is using low intensity strategies to currently do it but at least this one is more incompetent than the previous one and it too will fail.
There is a lot of he said she said here but the fact is Russia could never have gotten involved if Ukraine did not overstep and target civilians in some way. The invasion was merely the tail end of a decade long process. Yes you can make the argument that more Russians have died because of the war but you come up against arguments that they either merely sped up the process and that the Ukrainians are to blame in some way or another.... IMO though the Russians are simply guilty of stubborn incompetence here where they intended for a police action which spiraled into a war because of Western interference and they are simply too caught in the grip of history to admit they are not in full control. They don't in their minds have any way out other than through.... and they will blame Ukraine (with a degree of truth) for the excess deaths. I might be in ignorance about something but it stuns me that they did not do mass evacuations of the disputed areas unless they want to use them as human shields or something. It just seems blatantly stupid to still do it this way.
You make the mistake of thinking this is perceived as a war on Ukraine when it's a defensive war against the Western powers which seek to make Russia a client state. This is true both on the ground and in leadership... they don't even see Ukraine as the real enemy they are fighting it's just a puppet in the second phase of the cold war or cold war 2.0... and this is quite obviously true. This is not about a mere 10 years of humiliation for the Russians but about a century of humiliation the same way as it is for China only there it's multiple centuries they are sore about.... it's not about either the land or the resources, that's just a very welcome bonus. It does not help though that the age old pattern of the Slavs wanting to separate from the Russians with the Russians wanting to re-integrate them is repeating, this is something that has been going on for many centuries of to and fro. Ukraine is a kind of schizophrenic remnant of the original rulers of what is now Russia in many ways.
The Jew thing is a red herring. All that is needed for Nazism is any kind of National Socialism (Socialism being the state being in control of society at a granular level) combined with a "foreign" boogyman within your borders on which you can blame everything wrong with the world.... simple. Jews just happened to be the one the Germans blamed. There is nothing stopping Jews from being Nazi's.... in their case their boogeyman is the Arabs. In the case of Ukraine the boogeyman is the Russians.
It didn't, it posed a thread to Russians in Ukraine. The same justification incidentally that led to the war of Texan independence which drew American military aid. The moment Ukraine took the bait and made it about fighting the ethnically Russian they gave Russia a Cassius Belli on a silver platter.
The mistake is to place moral weight on the invasion as if it happened in isolation or even is the most important part of the story. Morals have nothing to do with it other than as propaganda.
No I never said Ukraine is a Nazi state, it has Nazi elements it uses to it's advantage.... or did at least until it backfired.
Ukraine is a corrupt sh-hole where the most powerful or wealthy people get their own way and has been spiraling into depravity imported from the West for a long time now.... just as my own country has incidentally. This has nothing to do with ideology it's about influence and usefulness. I don't hate them, I pity them, I know what they did to themselves because I live it first hand only in a different way. It's about mafia factions vying for turf while having political fronts representing them in government... or the political factions having crime syndicates greasing their wheels. Ukraine is not so much a pet project as a convenient proxy and slush fund for wealthy Western politicians.... I dunno if the biolabs thing has any validity but if true yes there is that threat too.... what would your country do if it believed a hostile force operated biolabs on it's border?
As for the supposed ideologies.... in the West the Liberals are not actually Liberal but by now open Leftists and the Libertarians are crypto fascists who show their true colours as soon as you present half a threat to them.... no one actually is what they pretend to be.
Apparently we're not supposed to discuss the causes of the war. So I won't dwell on this for too long.
But I really recommend you read more about Ukraine's language laws. Russian was never banned.
And a majority of Russian speakers in Ukraine didn't want to be invaded to be saved from tyranny.
Polls would show this. Or just ask the Ukrainian in this thread.
I'd also recommend you think more about the impact of language laws. Take the example of Quebec in Canada. It has had very strict laws limiting the use of English (or promoting French) for about 50 years. However, there still has been no genocide against English speakers and there is no sign of one yet. English is alive and well, it's still spoken and used by many people and institutions.
You engage in the slippery slope fallacy. You predict genocidal consequences because of some mild language laws. This type of hysterical reaction was sometimes seen in Quebec too, but it has obviously been shown to be completely false. It wouldn't be so bad if you wouldn't then use this fallacy to justify the invasion and all the suffering it caused.
Btw, maybe you didn't follow the Donbass war form 2014, but plenty of us did. There was no gratuitous shelling of Russian speakers. I really suggest you go back and read about it. All areas of the countries were mostly peaceful post-Maidan. Only in the Donbass, where Russia propped separatists with weapons, soldiers, money and intelligence did a war emerge. And indeed from that war there has been some collateral damage on both sides. Some units might have purposefully targeted purely civilian areas, we can speculate. But there's been no evidence of a coordinated policy to target civilians. And even if there was, it would have occured after Russia sent its little green men into Crimea and the Donbass, so it couldn't be used to justify an invasion that already started. By 2021, the conflict was pretty much frozen and civlian deaths almost zero. So again no justification for the larger scale invasion.
You're right that the US establishment is full of self-interest and will use and abuse its proxies and then abandon them. The main motivation driving their foreign policy is maintaining and increasing their power. And the same is true for Russia. Every humanitarian justification invoked for the war is just propaganda aimed at the feeble-minded, and I encourage you to see it. Countries usually don't go to war for humanitarian reasons (e.g. saving Russian speakers), they do out of geopolitical interests (or more often, geopolitical miscalculations).
You, yourself, say
Morals have nothing to do with it other than as propaganda.
Well in a way you're right. So why then do all kinds of mental gymnastics to give a purely moral justification to Putin's war?
Here you engage in black-and-white thinking again. Correctly describing the US as self-interested, but bending over backwards to try to present Russia's intervention as a selfless humanitarian war of conquest. You seem to be completely blind to this cognitive bias of yours.
You try to make Russia's intervention seem righteous by comparing them to the Texan Revolution? I'm confused.
As far as I know, the Anglos of Texas fought for independence mainly because they wanted to keep their slaves and make their own laws (I presume mostly regarding money and property) independently from Mexico City's centralist government, not because of some deep cultural discrimination or threat against their culture.
And if the US helped them it was never out of humanitarian goodwill but because it furthered its own foreign policy interests.
The expansionist ambitions of the US became even more obvious when they annexed Texas and then waged war on Mexico in 1846 based on a bogus casus belli.
Could you explain to me why this war currently waged by Russia is so different in its good intentions compared to all wars of the past?
I wanted to enage with you, because at least it seems like you pretend to speak in good faith.
But then your post deteriorates in the usual propaganda mumbo jumbo:
1. This war of conquest is "actually a defensive war against the West"
2. "I can call everyone I don't like a N*zi, words have no meanings" (in which case there's no point having a discussion?)
3. The classic ad hominem attacks on the Ukrainian nation, which "is a sh*thole" (what would it change to anything? it seems like you guys can't refrain from insulting an entire nation, which really just weakens your point and the fake persona you're trying to project of a detached and realistic observer)
4. And finally, when in doubt, "gays!" and "biolabs!"
Overall it was a good effort, but I suggest next time to try to avoid the logical fallacies and read a bit on the history of the conflict (and Texas maybe?). And once again, a more focused message would do wonder.
