For one, I don’t believe Ukraine belongs to Russia and I don’t want to be excusing Russian war crimes, let’s get that out of the way.

Almost everyone thinks the same, including Putin. Putin was reluctant to get involved in the start of this war in 2014, having to be pressured into it by the Communist Party:

The CPRF was the first to define the nature of the regime which seized power in Ukraine during the Maidan protests in 2014. Thenceforth, all the party’s activities have been based on the class essence of the ongoing political processes.

We have always been critical of the Russian leadership’s external policy, which effectively ignored the interests of the peoples which until recently were part of the single Soviet state.

Those who attentively follow our actions (and we assumed that the Greek comrades are thoroughly conversant with our documents) will know that it was the CPRF that has since 2014 consistently called for the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics. No other political party in Russia has done as much to support the population of Donbass. From the start, we supported the return of Donbass to Russia. It is not the CPRF that follows “the line of the ruling United Russia party and President Putin” but they, under the pressure of historical imperatives, have to follow the route which the CPRF has advocated for three decades.

For two, I also don’t want to say that Ukraine should cede all ground, let Russia take over (assuming that’s what they want to do), and only help the refugees who fled to us and do nothing else.

Ukraine won’t cede all ground, Russia doesn’t want Ukraine, it only wants the places in Ukraine where people want to be Russian now, Putin did not accept the referendums in DPR and LPR in 2014:

Let’s try to examine the roots of the conflict. It starts with those who for the past eight years have been talking to us about “separatists” or “independence” from the Donbass. It’s wrong. The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in May 2014 were not ” independence ” (независимость) referendums , as some unscrupulous journalists claimed , but ” self-determination ” or ” autonomy (самостоятельность). The term “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.

Also, I’m not sure what to make of Donbas and Crimea. It was indeed weird that NATO did nothing when the latter got annexed, but now…?

I’ll save NATO’s motivations for later, the reason why it seems like Donbass matters to Ukraine more than Crimea, is because it does. Ukrainians barely felt that Crimea was part of Ukraine. There were disproportionately few Ukrainians in Crimea, and they were largely there due to Soviet era migration for work. Crimea was added to Ukraine by the USSR because of proximity and Crimea’s reliance on Ukraine for fresh water. For a quick explanation of Ukraine’s three regions:

• Central Ukraine, the greater region that coalesced into a state under Kiev during the Russian Civil War.
• Eastern Ukraine, the greater region that coalesced into multiple states with Capitols in Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Odessa. After a period of war with Kiev in the vacuum of the collapse of the Russian Empire, they were absorbed into the Russian SSR, then soon after united with the state in Kiev as the Ukrainian SSR.
• Western Ukraine, also known as Galicia (with parts Volhynia surrounding it), a region of the Russian Empire that was annexed into Poland after the settlements of the first World War, the central city here is Lviv. It remained under Poland until 1939 when the Soviets occupied the region and united it with the Ukrainian SSR.

The last “region” of Ukraine was Crimea. Crimea’s history is largely independent of the 3 other regions of Ukraine. Crimea has always been more of “its own thing”.

Three, I’m wary of “future predictions”; I don’t want to predicate my stance on the matter on the possibility that Russia’s war effort will eventually falter and things will get back to normal anyways. Opinions akin to this do not seem very thought-out to me. Something similar goes regarding the Ukraine corruption and Nazis arguments. Yes, these issues are real, but it doesn’t seem to me like they justify letting Ukraine be invaded by someone who doesn’t seem to be doing it for those reasons in particular.

Yes, let’s skip what will happen, and focus on what has happened. This is where we have to talk about who’s ruling Ukraine, and why Donbas and Crimea do not want to be ruled by them, and why they now prefer to be ruled by Moscow.

The current Ukrainian government is a continuation of a government illegally installed through a violent coup in 2014:

Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard’s writings on the change of government in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014. Reporting that the neo-Nazi Right Sector was at the forefront of the violent overthrow, The New York Times (NewsGuard green check) wrote earlier that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of hard-line nationalist groups, reacted defiantly to news of the settlement, drawing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agreements that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,’ he said. ‘Right Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a single administrative building until our main demand is met — the resignation of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of the revolution.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’

The Right Sector did what they said they would. They started seizing government buildings, eventually they even seized the highest offices in the country:

Protestors had begun occupying Kiev City Hall in December, with a portrait of Ukraine’s World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera hanging from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fascist Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, announced that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had all come under control of the protestors.

Further, the Right Sector worked with right-wing politicians in the Rada (parliament), allowed them to hold an impeachment vote while their opposition were forcibly absent:

By any measure, Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His “impeachment” without his party present for the vote came after government buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the capital.

The “interim” (or one could factually say, coup) government was headed by Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Prime Minister, and Oleksandr Turchynov as Acting President. In a leaked phone call the US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland discussed who should staff the new government, weeks before the current (at the time) President was ousted. She also said that Biden (VP at the time) would meet with the Ukrainian opposition to speak on the transition of power in Ukraine.

The population was split:

The Maydan movement was never supported by more than about half the Ukrainian population. It was supported by a vast majority in Western Ukraine, by very few people in the East and South of the country, with people more evenly split in the center/North. This clearly was not a case of a government that had lost public support to such a degree that there was a general consensus that it should resign. It was the case of one political camp representing about half the country that had lost the last elections imposing its will with brutal deadly violence.

The anti-Maidan movement was largely in the eastern oblasts of Ukraine. The party that was overthrown, the Party of Regions, dominated this territory. They were popular and in 2012 they introduced a law to allow oblasts to designate minority languages like Russian as co-official languages alongside Ukrainian. When the Far-Right coalition took power, they immediately reversed it:

In fact, these republics did not seek to separate from Ukraine, but to have a statute of autonomy guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language. Because the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the overthrow of President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 which made Russian an official language. A bit as if putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages ​​in Switzerland.

Russian speaking Ukrainians continued to protest the new government. In May of 2014, the protests broke into violence, celebrated by the far right:

On May 2, 2014, 6 people were killed by gunfire, mostly on and around Odessa’s Hretska Square. At Kulykove Pole, approximately 12 blocks away, at least another 42 people—the overwhelmingly majority opponents of Kiev—died in a massacre carried out by far-right militia in the city’s trade union hall. Anti-Maidan protesters were assaulted and driven into the public building, which was then set ablaze. Hundreds were injured in the clashes. There is evidence that attackers lay in wait in the trade union hall, shooting, raping, and beating protesters as they sought cover inside.

Two days later, Right Sector, a heavily armed neo-fascist organisation that played a key role in overthrowing Yanukovych, published on its website a statement celebrating the killing of anti-Maidan activists in Odessa as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history.” Claiming responsibility for the slaughter, it wrote, “Bands of anti-state rebels were countered not by professional troops, but by the public, including about a hundred members of Right Sector, as well as ultras [extreme football fans] and patriotically-minded Odessa residents. … Right Sector fighters and other Ukrainian patriots sustained casualties, including some killed and some wounded. However, the losses among the Russian terrorists were much greater, and the very phenomenon of ‘separatists’ in Odessa has disappeared. All of this is attributable to a public unified in its patriotic feelings.”

Vice covered what happens next, the eastern oblasts declare autonomy, and seize the government buildings in their home districts, ousting the coup-government appointees. They declare autonomy from the state in Kiev. Ukraine entered civil war. The new government in Kiev launched multiple assaults to capture the east:

This decision causes a storm in the Russian-speaking population. This resulted in fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which began in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and a few massacres (in Odessa and Mariupol, for the most important). At the end of summer 2014, only the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk remained.

BTW, at this point besides occupying Crimea, Russia was not involved. The sympathetic Ukrainian soldiers defected to the Donbass side and beat back the Ukrainian military:

In 2014, I am at NATO, responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we are trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels in order to see if Moscow is involved. The information that we receive then comes practically all from the Polish intelligence services and does not “match” with the information from the OSCE: in spite of rather crude allegations, we do not observe any delivery of arms and materials Russian military.

The rebels are armed thanks to the defections of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units which cross over to the rebel side. As the Ukrainian failures progressed, the entire tank, artillery or anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what drives the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Accords.

But, just after signing the Minsk 1 Accords, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launched a vast anti-terrorist operation (ATO/Антитерористична операція) against Donbass. Bis repetita placent : poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat at Debaltsevo which forced them to commit to the Minsk 2 Agreements…

Because of the weak military, Ukraine had to rely on far right paramilitaries, some of these are quite famous, like Azov Battalion:

Thus, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially made up of foreign mercenaries, often far-right activists. As of 2020, they constitute around 40% of Ukraine’s forces and number around 102,000 men according to Reuters . They are armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There are more than 19 nationalities – including Swiss.

…These militias, stemming from the far-right groups that led the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, are made up of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of that of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division , which is the object of real veneration in Ukraine, for having liberated Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before to perpetrate the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, in France.

…The labeling of “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi” given to Ukrainian paramilitaries is considered Russian propaganda . Perhaps ; but that is not the opinion of The Times of Israel , the Simon Wiesenthal Center or the Counterterrorism Center at West Point Academy. But this remains debatable, because, in 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them with… the Islamic State. A choice !

…So the West supports and continues to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014 : rape, torture and massacres. But while the Swiss government has been very quick to impose sanctions against Russia, it has not adopted any against Ukraine, which has been slaughtering its own population since 2014. In fact, those who defend the rights of the men in Ukraine have long condemned the actions of these groups, but have not been followed by our governments. Because, in reality, we are not trying to help Ukraine, but to fight Russia.

These far right militias were merged into the department of territorial defense. The war, despite being in ceasefire under Minsk 2, continued as the militias turned “battalions” continued shelling civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk for 8 years. Just before the war, Ukraine ramped up the shelling of civilians:

On February 17, President Joe Biden announces that Russia will attack Ukraine in the coming days. How does he know? Mystery… But since the 16th, the artillery shelling of the populations of Donbass has increased dramatically, as shown by the daily reports of OSCE observers. Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacts and intervenes. We will say later that this is Russian disinformation. In fact, it seems that the European Union and some countries purposely glossed over the massacre of the people of Donbass, knowing that it would provoke Russian intervention.

I think that’s enough on the Nazi topic. Understand that the nature of the state in Ukraine is Russophobic, pro-Western, neo-Nazi inclusive, and uses fascist paramilitaries to suppress any and all opposition. I’ll continue on the other points in a reply.

I might come back to this thread to address your other points. How is NATO escalating? I’ll give you an answer from a NATO officer: https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/09/former-nato-military-analyst-blows-the-whistle-on-wests-ukraine-invasion-narrative/