And the best alternative is what exactly? One day Putin just randomly became a mad dictator who felt like attacking random neighbors because he got bored?
You have one side resurrecting the pasty faced ghost of Hitler while the guy they are accusing of being possessed by him is accusing the eternal victim that everyone agreed was one of the most corrupt countries on the planet of itself engaging in discount Nazism...... it's all so obviously stupid unless you start ignoring the TV puppets.
It barely takes any brainpower at all to realize that Ukraine was moronically open about it's desire to de-Russify it's land territory which politically forces Putin into some kind of action which after almost a decade led to broken promises that would have humiliated Russia if the war that Ukraine was tendering for did not occur. Internally speaking Putin almost had no choice but to invade given that his grip on power is so tenuous which the #IStandWithUkraine brigade tends to selectively ignore and remember depending on its usefulness.
The one thing Russia can be accused of is being inflexible and settling down into a counter strangulation strategy only using explosives and bullets where Nato chose encroachment, economic leveraging of Ukraine as a proxy club and legal weapons like sanctions and trade maneuvers.... and while it looks ugly ultimate it will work. What people don't realize is Russia already knew it had lost the PR phase so it had nothing left to lose, this is what happens when you put Russia into a vice and it can still hurt you back, Russia is Russia, when they realized the rules were drawn up in such a way that they always lose they chucked the rules out the window.... simple.
Yes the Nazi thing a great propaganda reason to invade.... the particular Nazi's in Ukraine is a threat to ethnic Russians.... the Nazi's in Russia is not.... mystery solved. The mistake people make is thinking Russians think like Americans or French or Germans because they still operate on the modern liberal religious assumption that all peoples are essentially the same no matter how many times the opposite is proven true. Russia pretends to acting with the moral high ground because that's what gets leadership popular support.... which leads us to the actually important thing.... the Russian PEOPLE are convinced that Ukraine symbolizes an existential threat. What is Ukraine? Ukraine is basically a mafia state that exports woman as sex workers (which has accelerated since the war with soldiers returning home to hear their wives were kidnapped and sold out of the country), that promotes all the worst aspects (from the pov of Russians) of Western culture like homosexuality and alphabetism. Putin would not say the things he does about Ukraine and the West if he was not sure it would get a positive response at home.
Yes NATO pretends to be defensive and yet it has in the past engaged in being bomb happy in bordering countries such as Yugoslavia.... much the same as Russia has been in Ukraine.... only it had the world politely turn it's eyes away so no one was embarrassed, "Just smile and wave boys, nothing to see here". The UN is a impotent cesspit of third world corruption and NATO is just as much of a political mafia as Russia is internally, it's an absolute fairy tale that this is good vs bad, it's just mafia vs mafia. It's all power politics and cause and effect.... morality has nothing to do with any of it this is just the sweet sweet story both sides tell their audiences.
And anyway it was proven to me very quickly that almost everyone losing their brains and essentially brawling like schoolyard girls are doing it because of obvious narcissism.... almost no one actually cares about the poor poor Ukrainian angles.... they just want to be part of the crowd on the right side of history and will forget this war ever happened within a few months of it's ending unless it's successfully drawn up as a recurring Palestine clone which gets randomly resurrected when everyone gets bored with the other virtue signals.... variety being the spice of life and all that. It's all rather disgusting but that's what people are these days, feminized little demons that stroke themselves while castigating anyone "on the wrong side of history" as if history is some kind of delightfully intense team sport. And the massive joke of it all... it's these useful idiots that ensure this war ends with the maximum dead Ukrainians because of their tireless work inflaming the butchering rather than seeking a sensible end to a war that was entirely preventable.... the same way they will do next time and next time after that. Opinions for the sake of endorphins and hate for the sake of catharsis don't end wars they cause them.
But of course anyone with a passing knowledge of history knows the pattern, foreign war your political enemies are in, you rant and rave and rage against them while proclaiming your undying sympathies for their opponent.... you don't lift a finger to actually DO something and afterwards pretend empathy when the blood is measured.... and it barely took a page for me to find exactly this in the latest page on this thread. Safe thoughts and prayers just like any other religious hypocrite coward.
Disclosure: the specifics are not relevant but I come from a people with a history of this which will likely soon be repeated so it hits very close to home, everyone fawns over how unfortunate it is and even promises to help but in the end just use you to weaken their rival they are too scared to actually fight then when you are beaten and impoverished they forget they ever made any kind of promise.
You are rightfully critical of Western propaganda, but seem to completely fall for Russian propaganda. This is the classic trap for the enlightened contrarian. You make a lot of claims that seem to have no basis in truth. I'd be curious about your evidence. But I presume like most others you will disappear when asked to articulate your arguments.
What were the efforts to de-Russify Ukraine? How is that in any way a justification for the invasion that caused hundreds of thousands to die and millions to suffer?
I'm not aware of any violent policy from the Ukrainian government against its Russian-speaking citizens. They only fought against an armed insurgency in the Donbass propped by Russia. Any sovereign country would do that.
There were some language policies to promote Ukrainian. Is that a reason to invade?
I come from a place that promotes its own language and discriminates legally against the use of English in the public sphere. Is that also a justification for an invasion?
If you think the invasion was a reaction to "de-Russification" efforts by Ukraine, you should ask yourself who caused the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Russian speakers through its invasion? Russia's actions have done much more to eliminate Russian speakers in Ukraine than Ukraine ever did in its history.
What was the inevitable humiliation of Russia that needed to be averted by war?
If anything the war itself has been a colossal humiliation for Russia. It took them two years to push past the suburbs of Donetsk. They suffered probably hundreds of thousands of casualties. The Black Sea Fleet got humiliated. And they significantly worsened their diplomatic relations with important economic partners.
How had Putin no choice? What would have happened if he didn't invade?
Russia had everything to start with. The largest landmass on Earth. Plenty of natural resources. And an enviable position between the world's centers of productions and centers of consumption. It doesn't seem like they were on the verge of some irreversible catastrophe, except maybe through the eyes of a megalomaniac or a paranoiac.
How do you define Nazism? What characteristics of Nazism did the Kyiv government have? How many of these characteristics does the Russian government have?
I don't see any of the main characteristics Nazism in Zelensky's governemnt (irredentism and expansionism, totalitarianism, virulent anti-semitism and anti-liberalsm). If anything Russia's regime is closer to that, but I would never qualify it as Nazi either. Using this term dishonestly is an insult to all the real victims of Nazism. The only authoritian policies of the Ukrainian state came after and as a reaction the invasion itself, so they cannot be used as a justification.
Doesn't it seem odd to describe as Nazi a multiparty democracy electing a Jewish Russian-speaking president?
I guess you'll say it's just an elaborate ploy. But I suggest you try to think a bit more.
In what credible way did this country, Ukraine, that you viciously describe as poor and corrupt, pose an existential threat to Russia? (The largest country on this planet with the largest nuclear arsenal...)
You guys always invoke this existential threat, but you never explain it because you know it doesn't make sense.
The Russian public might have believed it if they listened to enough propaganda but this does not make it true in any way.
Nobody says that everything is either good or bad. You're the one using this as a straw man to discredit your opponents. But there are things in life that are bad. Imperialism or expansionism, and the wars and suffering that ensue, are bad, wheter they come from NATO or Russia. This is very easy to say for anybody with moral principles. People can have moral principles (ascribing a moral value to actions) without necessarily engaging in dichotomous black-and-white thiking as you seem to suggest. This might sound utopian to the most cynical among us, but it's just the most basic common sense. Saying that the invasion was wrong does not mean that one thinks that NATO is a a faultless force of good. There is no link between the two. It is your post, by making this assumption, that engages in black-and-white thinking and thus completely lacks nuance.
Overall your message appears confused. You seem to have internalized different propaganda messages that end up contradictory. One one hand, you say Russia invaded because Ukraine was National Socialist. On the other, Ukraine is a pet-project of the West that tries to transform it into a decadent homosexual liberal hellhole. Despite what's being said by the third-rate propaganda you might have consumed online, national socialism and liberalism are opposed ideologies. A cursory reading of any encycopledia would tell you.
Maybe next time, instead of this confused mess, try to chose just one hateful propaganda message and stick with it? It would have a bit more credibility.